One On One With David Stout, President of Pharmaceuticals Operations at GlaxoSmithKline
Thursday, May 04, 2006
|
|
|
|
SUSIE GHARIB: The Federal government signed contracts today worth more than $1 billion to help produce vaccines in the event of a flu pandemic. The Department of Health and Human Services said that right now, the U.S. can`t produce enough vaccine fast enough to reach everyone who would need it. The five companies receiving the five-year contracts are: Medimmune, Novartis, Dyn-Port, Solvay Pharmaceutical, and GlaxoSmithKline. And joining us now is Glaxo`s president of pharmaceuticals operations, David Stout. Hi, David.
DAVID STOUT, PRESIDENT, PHARMACEUTICAL OPERATIONS, GLAXOSMITHKLINE: Good afternoon, Susie.
GHARIB: So how long would it take the United States to get prepared, and I`m talking about in terms of getting vaccines and drugs to all the people who would need it?
STOUT: Well, what we`re doing right now, today`s award was dealing with a specific way to manufacture flu vaccines, and that`s called tissue cell culture. The way to manufacture using this technology is probably three to five years away. So if the pandemic flu is to come in the three to five-year timeframe, we`ll probably have to rely on some of the more traditional tried and true methods, such as the egg-based technology that we`re currently using. Of course, the government is also preparing in other ways. They`re stockpiling, also drug treatments so that if people contract the flu, they`ll have ways to treat it. GlaxoSmithKline is uniquely positioned in the fact that we make one of the two preparations that is believed to be useful in treating the flu, as well as working very diligently on a vaccine for a pandemic.
GHARIB: So what is your sense in terms of governments -- the United States government in particular, businesses and hospitals, their level of stockpiles? How would you rate the status of those stockpiles?
STOUT: I think if you talk to virtually any governments around the world today, they would all say that they wish they were further along. I think the U.S. government has to be applauded because they`ve been moving very quickly. In fact, today`s announcement is the first time that any government has really put out major incentives and major help to accelerate the development of a vaccine for a pandemic flu.
GHARIB: Now, we know that viruses shift, and you mentioned that you have one of the -- one of the vaccines that would be helpful, I guess, for the h5 influenza virus, but how quickly could you respond to a viral mutation?
STOUT: Well, let me talk about first what we call our pre-pandemic vaccine that we`re developing. We use novel ashbin technology and I know that`s a very technical term, but we believe the use of this technology will help us to develop a pre-pandemic vaccine specific to h5n1 that hopefully confers some range of protection against a mutated version. Now once, of course, h5n1 mutates and becomes transmittable from human to human, we would then have -- it would take us about two to three months before we could begin to see production coming out of the traditional methods that we see today. It takes a couple of weeks for the World Health Organization to get together to get strain that is circulating provided to the manufacturers, and then there is about a six week cycle to start producing vaccine.
GHARIB: How confident are you that your company and other drug companies - you produce all these vaccines -- how confident are you that the execution plan will be effective in terms of getting these vaccines to all the people who will need protection.
STOUT: I guess a lot of it will depend on timing. Right now if something was to happen, it would not be as good a response as if it was in two to three years from now. We will begin actually making an h5n1 vaccine at the beginning of this - at the end of this year. We have in clinical trials right now in fact two different formulations that we think can help reduce the amount of antigen that is required which means that basically we should be able to get more doses out of our current production capacity. Of course the more time we have, the better prepared we`ll be.
GHARIB: Let`s hope we don`t even have to ever deal with this down the road. But thank you very much for coming on our program to explain what Glaxo is doing.
STOUT: Thank you very much, Susie.
GHARIB: We`ve been speaking with David Stout, president of pharmaceuticals operations at GlaxoSmithKline.
