A Delaware laboratory has been awarded $5.3 million in federal funding for the development of a vaccine that would provide protection against both anthrax and plague, the News Journal reported today (see GSN, Dec. 8, 2009).
The Fraunhofer USA Center for Molecular Biotechnology announced yesterday that it had won a contract from the U.S. Defense Department's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which is charged with safeguarding the United States from weapons of mass destruction.
Washington is searching for new production methods that can speedily produce large quantities of vaccines as countermeasures to possible biological weapon attacks (see GSN, Jan. 5).
Using the funding, Fraunhofer intends to test the single-dose vaccine on animals to prove that it is effective and safe. The aim is to have a vaccine that can also be tested on humans.
"We're in a range where we have some solid deliverables that we have to make sure we deliver at the end of the contract," laboratory Executive Director Vidadi Yusibov said.
The laboratory's new vaccine-production method uses tobacco plants to grow the desired proteins. Yusibov said Fraunhofer intends to produce individual vaccines for plague and anthrax and then add them together in a one-shot dosage (Andrew Eder, News Journal, Jan. 6).