Issue 10.02 | Feb 2002
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Stop the Flu in One Breath
Heart transplants and skin grafts are impressive, but even much smaller medical advances can make our lives better. Case in point: Canadian company ID Biomedical is working to replace those painful shots with inhalable vaccines.
Aside from the thrill of no more needle sticks in the arm, there's another benefit to ID Biomedical's approach. Its vaccine doesn't use live germs, as most vaccines do. For the flu vaccination, ID Biomedical extracts a protein from the influenza virus and mixes it with proteosomes taken from the cell wall of harmless bacteria.The result: a portable, safe vaccination.
Not surprisingly, the US military has jumped on ID Biomedical's technology. The Army recently enlisted the firm to make a nasal spray that prevents plague pneumonia, a biowarfare germ.
CEO Tony Holler says that, theoretically, the method should work just as well for other diseases, from anthrax to chicken pox, and ID Biomedical has already begun work on a nasal spray for allergies. But FDA approval is a long way off. The flu spray, which will finish its first human trials this month, won't be widely available for several years, and a plague spray for public consumption is at least a decade away. Soldiers, though, may get theirs earlier. The military is exempt from some FDA regulations, which means the Army could start inhaling inoculations as soon as 2005.
- Jennifer Kahn