Takaaki Iwabu - tiwabu@newsobserver.com
Mike Wanner of Medicago escorts Gov. Perdue, who attended the ribbon-cutting with other officials.
The Triangle is emerging as a national hub for vaccine development and manufacturing as pharmaceutical companies break their dependence on blockbuster drugs and look for new sources of revenue.
Recent pandemic scares and advances in the biological sciences have assured thousands of jobs locally as the drug industry embarks on a new quest: cheaper, faster and safer vaccines to combat common illnesses, epidemics and bioterrorism.
On Monday, the Canadian company Medicago dedicated a new vaccine plant in Durham that currently has 55 employees, the most recent vaccine plant expansion announced in the Triangle. Medicago is expected to expand to 75 workers in January when the company begins work on a $21 million federal contract to test a high-speed, high-volume production method for pandemic flu vaccine.
Many of the world's leading vaccine makers have a major operation here, including Novartis, Pfizer and Merck. As pharmaceutical divisions have slashed jobs globally to reduce revenues, the vaccine operations have been adding hundreds of jobs in the Triangle.
The federal government is a major source of financing for what is expected to become a $200 billion industry by 2020 as vaccines are transformed from a shrinking backwater to a high growth area, Medicago CEO Andy Sheldon said.
The reasons for the shift are many, but a big cause is a slowdown in the blockbuster drugs that kept the industry flush with cash. Newer discoveries are becoming less frequent while cash-intensive miracle drugs are being turned into cheap generics.
"The blockbuster drug, it has died," said Richard Kouri, an N.C. State University business professor specializing in the bioscience industry. "There are hundreds of billions of dollars in drugs coming off patent in the coming years."
The precise size of the local vaccine hub is hard to estimate because the drug industry is not broken down by vaccine production. But North Carolina has more employees in biological product manufacturing, a federal labor category that includes vaccines, than any other state. Last year the state had 4,552 employees in that category, more than 17 percent of the national market, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Medicago's new plant
Medicago creates vaccines using tobacco plants grown in a nursery at the Durham lab, a process that can reduce the production time from six months to less than two months. Medicago's approach involves growing viruslike cultures in the tobacco leaves and extracting the proteins in a laboratory. Vaccines are typically grown in chicken eggs or tissue cultures.
Medicago is in the experimental stages of its high-speed manufacturing process and will need federal approval before its products can by used by the public. The company expects to be able to mass-produce vaccines for the pandemic flu and for the seasonal flu by 2015.
Medicago officials gave a tour of their automated lab on Monday, showing an assembly-line process in which potted Australian tobacco plants are racked, lifted and dunked in a bacteria solution by mechanical arms.
The tobacco-based process has been in development for at least a decade, but a lack of funds put many of the original innovators out of business.
"We put the pieces together, basically," Sheldon said. "We express, extract, purify and put it in a vial."
Nothing to sneeze at
Meanwhile, Merck's vaccine plant in Durham is poised to become the largest live-vaccine production facility in the world. The rapidly growing lab, which makes chicken pox vaccine, employs more than 700 today and could expand to 1,000 workers at full production. By 2013 Merck expects to be making at the Durham facility at least four vaccines for shingles, measles, mumps and rubella.
Another major expansion site is Pfizer's Sanford plant. It employs nearly 700 people and prepares the ingredients for children's vaccine for infections that can cause pneumonia and meningitis. The facility has also been selected to supply ingredients for Pfizer's future vaccines.
Not far behind is Novartis' vaccine plant in Holly Springs, where 400 employees are working on an influenza inoculation made from cell cultures rather than chicken eggs. The plant is expected to be in full commercial production by 2013, in time for that winter's flu season.
Duke University medicine professor Tom Denny, who is also chief operating officer at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute, said that for years companies had been getting out of the vaccine business because of low profit margins and lack of growth potential.
He said many medical conditions and infections still do not have a vaccine.
"We have a need to produce vaccines that are faster and in a way that has less risk and side effects," Denny said. "There are a lot of things popping up for which we need a vaccine."
