Vaccination remains the most effective preventative measure for influenza infection. Seasonal influenza epidemics and the emergence of pandemic strains have increased the global demand for influenza vaccines, putting significant pressure on vaccine manufacturers. However, current vaccine manufacturing strategies rely primarily upon production in eggs, an age-old method that needs to be significantly improved. Recently, research from our lab identified a panel of novel compounds termed viral sensitizers (VSes) that increased virus production up to 1000 fold in cultured cells.

Manufacturing of consistently high quality products is the commitment of pharmaceutical industry. To achieve this, new products must be thoroughly tested and the results meet government-approved product specifications. Improving existing and adopting improved analytical technologies for product testing ensure the production of safe and effective products. This is particularly critical for the manufacturing of biologic products which, relative to small molecular drugs, have a larger size, are more complex in structure and are thus more difficult to characterize.

The objective of the study is to exploit process analytical technologies within the framework of metabolic engineering to elucidate the causes of spectrofluorometric patterns relevant to biological formation of vaccine antigens. The ultimate benefit would be less variability in the processes which would minimize potential vaccine shortages.