Saturday, 16 September 2017
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This is the third topic in my six-part Vaccine Supply Chain Futures series, and concerns changes in vaccines and the technology of administration of vaccines.

No change in supply chain technologies can impact immunization coverage more than change in the presentation and administration of vaccines themselves. The more compact and thermo-stable vaccines become, the more children can be reached for immunization. As services seek the last 20% of children who have not been reached and as the number of vaccines to be delivered increases steadily, streamlining the process by design is now a high priority. But progress has been slow and many key issues including those now presented in the file attached to this post, are at best only partly addressed.

Please reply to this post with your views and I would be grateful if you could answer just four questions in this SurveyMonkey:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/69L2NZS

I will return the analysis to you at the end of next week 22/09/17 and the results will be posted before the TechNet Conference for all five topics.

Thank you!

6 years ago
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#4779

SurveyMonkey results for Topic 3: Changes in vaccines and in their delivery systems (see result tables in the attached file for full details).

83% of respondents strongly agreed that the overall strategy for the development of vaccine products that are easier to deliver and administer is unclear, that leadership is fragmented and so operational attributes of new vaccine products are not communicated effectively to vaccine manufacturers. Lets consider three examples of technology changes.

First, a third of respondents felt that the CTC initiative would ultimately permit all vaccines to be taken out of the cold chain and 50% believed CTC would remain limited to a few individual antigens used in mass immunization. Either way, the remaining respondents hold the view that eliminating the cold chain is a realistic vision.

Second, the safety risks associated with manual reconstitution of lyophilized vaccines were not perceived to be important enough to dis-allow manual reconstitution but most respondents felt that automatic reconstitution would be desirable if feasible and affordable

Finally, 83% of respondents agreed strongly or somewhat to the suggestion that the control of intellectual property for novel single dose injection devices should allow the technology to be used with vaccines from multiple sources. But at the last meeting on vaccine administration technology, the majority of solutions shown or discussed was exclusively linked to vaccine producers and selected vaccine products.

These three examples reveal that in this vital field of choice, the attributes of future vaccine presentations, may be receiving scrutiny in hidden research programs and in industry but objective and transparent review by global leadership has fallen away. One might say that this field is out of control. Unless an authoritative, independent and technically strong leadership is restored, new vaccines will continue to emerge with impractical attributes and unwanted formats. Worse, the vaccine industry will work with a low priority given to the very aspects that can restrain or enhance immunization coverage.

6 years ago
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#4786

This is a response to the proposal to evaluate accelular Pertussis as a less heat sensitive candidate for DTP and Pentavalent vaccines. The hope would be to develop a 'Flagship' hexavalent vaccine for CTC that contains vaccines that are very heat stable.

The authors are experts but will remain anonymous unless this receives a response. Their comment was 'Do no harm':

  • acellular pertusssis vaccine in the US has not performed terribly well.
  • whole cell pertussis vaccine proved its potential to reduce the disease in West Africa in the 70s and 80s
  • when whole cell and acellular vaccines were tested head-to-head in Senegal, whole cell was more protective

I am left with the impression that this question has not been examined or documented thoroughly. I expect that if we wished, we could convince industry to achieve such important goals as the Flagship Hexavalent !

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