One of Glaxo's main rivals, the French drug company Sanofi Aventis, has also been working on a vaccine.
Drug companies are looking to develop treatments because of concerns that the H5N1 virus will combine with a human flu virus and mutate into a form which can spread between humans.
Bird flu has been spreading outwards from Asia |
But a number of firms, including Glaxo, are seeking to develop vaccines based on the existing H5N1 strains to give humans some form of protection.
Its vaccine is on a fast track for approval with the relevant licensing authorities - the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Evaluation Agency (EMEA).
"All being well, we expect to make regulatory filings for the vaccine in the coming months," said Glaxo chief executive Jean-Pierre Garnier.
Prime desire
The UK and US have both indicated a desire to "prime" their respective populations with an initial inoculation.
Glaxo's Garnier has spoken to US President Bush about the vaccine |
Mr Garnier said he recently met US President George W Bush to discuss the vaccination programme.
Following that meeting, Glaxo received $272m (£148m) of funding, earmarked in part to develop new technologies to produce vaccines.
If there was a pandemic outbreak in the early autumn, mass manufacture of Glaxo's vaccine could probably be started quickly by collaborating with rival pharmaceutical companies.
Glaxo said it was also talking to the Gates Foundation about how to provide the vaccine to poorer, developing countries.
Shotgun effect
Despite the company's optimism, a number of unanswered questions remain.
Firstly, there is uncertainty over how many doses can be manufactured quickly, and how easy it would be to switch from laboratory testing to mass production.
And secondly, it is not clear how effective the vaccination would be if H5N1 were to mutate significantly.
Chicken flu and other viruses often go through a process of mutation |
Glaxo says its vaccine is more akin to shotgun treatment than a "precision-rifle cure", which means that it appears to be effective against small mutations in the virus strain.
Glaxo said the cost of the vaccine is likely to be a little more than for conventional flu vaccines, which retail for about £4 per shot.
"The vaccine is an affordable option ahead of a pandemic emerging," said Ian Jones Virology professor at Reading University.
According to Glaxo, the side effects to its bird flu vaccine have been limited to a fever in a number of patients.
Laser useful for severe facial acne
Last Updated: 2006-07-27 8:20:47 -0400 (Reuters Health)
[Corrects story posted July 24, 2006. In Paragraph 4, corrects researcher's affiliation, which was erroneously stated in original version as the University of Texas School of Medicine in Houston.]
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Laser treatment can reduce inflammatory facial acne lesions with few side effects, new research shows. Moreover, it appears to work even with the darkest skin types.
The findings, which appear in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, are based on a study of 22 patients, with light to dark skin types, who underwent three treatments with the laser -- specifically a1450-nanometer diode laser -- at 3 to 4 week intervals. The subjects received treatment at high or low doses on the left or the right side of the face, the report indicates.
After three treatments, average acne lesion counts were reduced by about 75% and 70% with the low and high dose treatment, respectively, Dr. Ming H. Jih, from DermSurgery Associates in Houston, Texas, and colleagues report. These reductions basically persisted at a 12-month follow-up examination.
Side effects were minimal -- typically transient redness and swelling -- and the procedure-related pain was well tolerated, the investigators note.
The results indicate that the laser is a safe and effective treatment for facial inflammatory acne vulgaris, the researchers conclude. They say it is "a suitable first-line, second-line, or (add-on) treatment modality for moderate to severe acne."
SOURCE: Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, July 2006.
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Women Pregnant With Girls Experience More Severe Asthma Symptoms
Women with asthma who are carrying a female fetus are more likely to experience worse asthma symptoms than asthmatic women carrying a male fetus, researchers at Yale School of Medicine report in the February issue of American Journal of Epidemiology.
"This is one of the first and largest studies to investigate the effect of fetal sex on the severity of the mother's asthma, and one of the largest to investigate the effect of fetal sex on any disease of the mother," said senior author Michael B. Bracken, Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale School of Medicine.
The researchers monitored 702 pregnant women throughout southern New England who were trained to assess their lung function for 10-day intervals at selected points in pregnancy. Lung function and a large number of other factors that might influence severity of the mother's asthma were recorded automatically.
Asthma worsened in mothers with either male or female fetuses until about 30 weeks gestation, after which there was an improvement in lung function. However, throughout pregnancy, mothers with a male fetus had 10 percent better lung function.
"This difference due to sex is potentially important but needs to be placed in the context of other factors which have a greater impact on the severity of mother's asthma, including inadequate medical management of asthma symptoms, and whether the mother was a smoker or not," said Bracken, who also co-directs the Yale Center for Perinatal, Pediatric and Environmental Epidemiology.
The authors speculate that testosterone, secreted by the male fetuses, may relax the mother's bronchial tissue and inhibit response to histamines. Other sex-specific factors excreted by female fetuses may aggravate inflammation in mothers. Bracken said more research is needed to test these hypotheses.
Asthma is one of the most common diseases associated with pregnancy. An upcoming study by the authors to be published this spring, shows that eight to nine percent of pregnant women have a history of asthma.
###
The principal author of this research is Helen Kwon, who completed the work as a doctoral student in Epidemiology at Yale and is now at Columbia University. Other authors are Kathleen Belanger and Theodore R. Holford of Yale.
The Yale Center for Perinatal, Pediatric and Environmental Epidemiology conducts population-based research into a broad range of environmental, clinical, behavioral and genetic factors that influence the health of pregnant women, their infants and children. Details can be found at: http://publichealth.yale.edu/cppee/
Citation: Am. J. Epidemiol; 163; 217-221 (Feb. 2006).
Contact: Karen N. Peart
karen.peart@yale.edu
Yale University
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All being well, we expect to make regulatory filings for the vaccine in the coming months
