Rapid Quantification Of Egg-Grown Influenza

Embryonated chicken eggs have been the primary means of producing influenza vaccines for many decades. Although there has been significant effort to move away from this system, it will continue to provide the bulk of the global vaccine supply during the current decade and possibly well into the next. Until newer cell-based approaches are validated and scaled-up, there remains ample opportunity to improve egg-based methods. A notable bottleneck is the quantification of virus along the entire vaccine development and manufacturing process. Current approaches often require days or weeks to obtain a result, limiting their utility or potentially delaying the time-critical process of getting vaccines for seasonal and emerging pandemic strains to the public.

Consequently, there is an urgent need for faster, more accurate methods of determining the amount of virus present during the creation of these life-saving products.

There are many points during the process of developing, optimizing and producing vaccines that would benefit from rapid enumeration of viral particles. One of the most significant is tracking efficiency following harvest from egg- and cell-based systems. More often than not, the long and complex steps of taking crude material and transforming it into a product ready for patients results in substantial loss of material. The ability to track essentially in real time the quantity of virus at the beginning and end of each distinct stage will identify where losses are occurring and allow improvements to be made. Even small gains in efficiency at each step would lead to considerable financial benefits.