GSK is the latest firm to announce the shipment of its contracted batch of flu vaccine to the States, sending over a combined 30-35 million doses of its seasonal flu shots Fluarix and FluLaval.
The volume is up on the company's contribution last year, when the firm supplied around 25 million doses in time for the 2006/2007 flu season. This isn't bad considering the company has only been supplying the US market with flu vaccine for a few years, though is still a little less than competing vaccine manufacturers were contracted to provide.
Novartis and Sanofi Pasteur started shipping their supplies of vaccine for this year's US flu season almost a month ago, with Novartis down to provide 40 million doses of its trivalent inactivated vaccine Fluvirin (up on the 30 million or so sent over last year), and Sanofi supplying 50 million doses of Fluzone.
GSK, however, has been ploughing full steam ahead with plans to become a major player in the vaccine market, aiming to take particular advantage of the growing demand in the market for flu vaccines.
Back in 2005 the company invested almost €100m ($72m) to more than double manufacturing capacity for Fluarix at it production site in Germany, aiming to push production capacity to 80 million doses by 2008.
However, since then GSK has been on a roll, snapping up facilities left, right and center to expand its capacity and capabilities in the vaccine market.
The acquisition of Canada-based ID Biomedical significantly increased the company's flu vaccine manufacturing capacity, bringing the combined production capacity of the German plant and Canadian facility to an estimated 150 million doses of flu vaccine per year by 2008.
In addition to this, the company plans to introduce cell-based flu vaccine production to its manufacturing capabilities by 2010, and to this end snapped up a secondary 90-acre manufacturing site in Pennsylvania to focus on the development and production cell-culture-based flu vaccines.
GSK's Fluarix vaccine wasn't approved in the US until the summer of 2005, but GSK had already played a hand helping alleviate the chaos during the 2004/2005 flu when contamination at a UK vaccine plant run by Chiron threatened half the entire US flu vaccine supply. GSK stepped in, providing four million emergency doses of Fluarix to the US market during the height of the flu season in December 2004.
FluLaval was added to GSK's portfolio through the acquisition of ID Biomedical, and was approved in the US in 2006 to immunize adults over 18 years against flu caused by influenza virus types A and B.
The company is also in the process of developing a flu vaccine aimed specifically at the elderly population particularly susceptible to the disease. This project was helped along somewhat by yet another acquisition, this time the 2005 purchase of Seattle-based adjuvant specialist Corixa.
This buy gave GSK access to the company's novel MPL adjuvant, which the company claims boosts the immune response to flu in elderly patients when administered with its flu vaccine compared to unadjuvanted Fluarix.
GSK's deliveries of its portion of this year's supply of flu shots to the US will be carried out over the next month or so, with the full batch due to arrive on US shores by the end of October.
Despite this year representing the heftiest US stash of flu vaccine to date, coming in at around 130 million doses, there is still likely to be at least some shortfall in supply going by demand estimates.
