Biotechs Race for New Vaccine

Meanwhile, Emergent has been working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to reduce BioThrax's prolonged dosage of six injections over 18 months, and it has submitted an application to the Food and Drug Administration showcasing BioThrax's stability in hopes of lengthening the vaccine's three-year shelf life to four years. In addition, Emergent recently received a federal award for up to $29.7 million to create an enhanced form of BioThrax, which has a shortened dosage.

But PharmAthene also received a development contract for up to $83.9 million to make a recombinant anthrax vaccine that can be stored at room temperature. Last week a $13.1 million investment from Panacea Biotec of India, which purchased PharmAthene shares at a 90 percent premium the day after the Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 700 points, reaffirmed the Annapolis start-up's threat to the more-established Emergent, said Stephen G. Brozak, president of WBB Securities, a San Diego investment and research firm.

A new anthrax vaccine has been a long time coming. In 2001, shortly after the post-Sept. 11 anthrax attacks that killed five and sickened 17, a committee of scientists declared that the public "urgently needed" a better anthrax vaccine. Seven years later, BioThrax is still the only one available.

Emergent has already shown a willingness to put up an aggressive fight for the new contract. When VaxGen won its $877.5 million contract for 75 million doses of rPA 102, Emergent, then known as BioPort, spent millions of dollars lobbying for BioThrax. In an op-ed, one key Emergent lobbyist alluded to VaxGen as an "unproven supplier" of an "experimental anthrax vaccine" -- the very vaccine Emergent now champions.

In its pitch for rPA 102, Emergent has emphasized that it would be offering the U.S. stockpile "a domestic source" -- as it's made in Michigan. PharmAthene would still rely on Britain's Avecia to make part of the vaccine.

PharmAthene responded, saying its manufacturing process, which manipulates E. coli to construct protective antigens, would be able to make a vaccine faster than Emergent's, which uses bacillus.

"When VaxGen failed and their product was available for purchase, we looked to it very carefully," said David P. Wright, PharmAthene's chief executive. "But we found the Avecia product to be further along."

But Emergent and PharmAthene still have to successfully roll out their vaccines on a commercial level to keep a contract -- the stage VaxGen ran into trouble. VaxGen's vaccine was effective in the laboratory, but its stability stumbled as production ramped up.

To make a commercial batch of chemical drugs, companies just multiply the ingredients, much like a recipe, said Michael Kurilla, director of the Office of Biodefense Research Affairs at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. But biologic drugs are made in living cells that are used as mini-factories.

"The manufacturing of recombinants is still more of an art than a science," Kurilla said. "People are still learning the nuances."