April 21, 2006

Bird flu may cause vaccine industry to double in 5 years

Bird flu has brought about a sea-change in the once dormant vaccine market and could easily cause market value to double over the next five years, independent research group Datamonitor said on Thursday (Apr 19).

The flu vaccine market could exceed US$3 billion by 2010 against an estimated US$1.6 billion worldwide in 2005.

There are 18 flu vaccine manufacturers in the world. Sanofi-Aventis leads the pack with revenues of US$835 million in 2005 and a 45 percent global market share by value in 2004.

Since normal seasonal vaccines would not be effective in a pandemic, companies are now racing to develop novel vaccines designed to contain the threat.

There has been a flurry of activity in the vaccines sector last year, with big industry players in a buying spree to acquire smaller companies: GlaxoSmithKline bought ID Biomedical, Novartis acquired Chiron and Crucell took over Berna. These deals have been primarily aimed at cranking up capacity and achieving novel know-how.

Current techniques use chicken eggs to derive vaccines, a time-consuming process that hampers mass production. New manufacturing technologies, like cell-culture based methods, could account for 15 percent of overall flu vaccine capacity in the near future, Datamonitor predicted.