Local bird flu vaccine to get clinical tests

The emergency vaccine, developed by the National Health Research Institute, will mainly be used for emergency use in the event of an H5N1 outbreak among humans, said Shih Wen-yi, deputy director of the DOH's Centers for Disease Control.

According to Shih, the DOH is scheduled to authorize clinical trials for the locally developed bird flu vaccines in the second quarter of this year, and the first phase of the trials are expected to get underway in the third quarter.

As the research institute has a limited production capacity, Shih said, the locally developed vaccine will only be enough for emergency use if Taiwan is struck by an H5N1 outbreak in humans.

A few years ago, the DOH launched a BOO (build-operate-own) project under which a private contractor was picked to produce locally developed human bird flu vaccines.

The bid, however, was dropped because the winning contractor was later merged into another entity in a corporate restructuring.

Shih said the DOH is appraising the feasibility of renewing the BOO project to draw the private sector into investing in human H5N1 vaccine production.

Meanwhile, a research team headed by Academia Sinica President Chi-Huey Wong at the institute's Genomics Research Center has developed DNA-based vaccines against both human influenza and avian flu, academic sources said Friday.

According to the sources, the procedural platform developed by the team can produce such DNA-based vaccines for emergency use within six months.

The team's research findings have been published in the noted American science journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.”

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