Egg Beaters.

• Autores: Karen Hopkin
• Localización: Scientific American, ISSN 0036-8733, Vol. 290, Nº. 3, 2004, págs. 16-17
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Flu vaccine makers look beyond the chicken egg. If you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs. And if you want to supply the U.S. with flu vaccine, you have to break about 100 million. That may change someday, as leading vaccine manufacturers explore the possibility of trading their chicken eggs for stainless-steel culture vats and growing their flu virus in cell lines derived from humans, monkeys or dogs. The technology could allow companies to produce their vaccines in a more timely and less laborious manner and to respond more quickly in an emergency. Today's flu vaccines are prepared in fertilized chicken eggs, a method developed more than 50 years ago. Now when a new strain of flu is discovered, researchers often need to tinker with the virus to get it to reproduce in chicken eggs. Makers using cultured cells could save time by skipping that step, perhaps even starting directly from the circulating virus isolated from humans. As an added bonus, the virus harvested from cells rather than eggs might even look more like the virus encountered by humans, making it better fodder for a vaccine, adds Michel DeWilde, executive vice president of R& D at Aventis, the world's largest producer of flu vaccines and a partner with Crucell in developing flu shots made from human cells.