What is it about?
Pneumococcal diseases are caused by a bacterium called Streptococcus pneumoniae. Although there are vaccines available, they are either inefficient for children, elderly and immunocompromised patients or very expensive and provide protection against only some serotypes of the bacterium, which leads to a selective pressure and serotype replacement in the population, mitigating the benefits of vaccination with the time. An alternative low-cost, safe and serotype-independent vaccine was developed and this study evaluates a production process that improves the number of doses produced per lot using the same plant. The study also shows that the vaccine quality produced by the new process is the same as that obtained by the traditional production method.
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Why is it important?
The process intensification achieved in this study has high potential for scale up and bulk production of pneumococcal whole-cell vaccine, as well as of other whole-cell vaccines, which could be especially important to attend an epidemiological emergency, when a high number of vaccine doses are needed in a very short period of time.
Perspectives
I hope the process intensification developed, i.e., perfusion-batch cultivation with cell recycling integrated to the cell separation process, will be explored for large-scale production of pneumococcal whole-cell vaccine for human immunization in order to offer to the poorest population of the world a safe and low-cost alternative to protect against pneumococcal diseases.
Dr. Viviane Maimoni Goncalves
Instituto Butantan
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Process intensification for production of
Streptococcus pneumoniae
whole‐cell vaccine, Biotechnology and Bioengineering, March 2020, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/bit.27307.
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