What are advances that are being made in cell culture technology?
GN. There’s been very good progress with cell culture based technologies. It’s very important particularly if you have a disease like avian flu, where you are dependent on chicken eggs to grow your vaccine. Avian flu could potentially wipe out these chickens, and there would not be a vaccine. If it’s done properly, there’s more control over adventitious agents, purity and reproducibility with cell culture vaccines. Acambis developed one for smallpox that looks like it’s performing very well, and Novartis has developed a cell culture method for flu vaccine. There are other companies that are developing them. It’s an important advance in the product technology, so I’m very happy to see it. We’re basically in a renaissance period for vaccines. A few years ago, they were regarded as something that we took for granted, where there was thought not to be a lot of science behind it. Now, it’s the opposite. You’re seeing the very latest in x-ray crystallography, structure-based design, immunolo
