By Stefan Merlo, Seqirus Vice President Commercial Development
Each of us can draw upon lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, both personally and professionally. When reflecting on my time at Seqirus prior to and during the pandemic, widespread awareness of vaccine innovation and what it means for protecting public health is top of mind. In my 15 years of working in the vaccines business, I have never before seen a time when everyone – no matter who you are – has questions about and a genuine interest in vaccine technology.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as reported between 2010 to 2020, seasonal influenza is estimated to have resulted in 9 million to 41 million illnesses, 140,000 to 710,000 hospitalizations, and 12,000 to 52,000 deaths every year.1 That’s why influenza vaccination is so critical to public health – CDC estimates that influenza vaccines prevented an estimated 7.52 million illnesses, 3.69 million medical visits, 105,000 hospitalizations, and 6,300 deaths during the 2019/20 season.2 While influenza vaccines provide this significant public health benefit, we have the opportunity to develop new approaches with the goal of improving on current technologies.
When people think about innovation, it is no surprise that flu vaccines may not be top of mind since they’ve been around since 1945. For decades, they did not change all that much until a recent innovation renaissance, in which multiple new innovations were developed. The influenza vaccine market is now flush with different options building on the original flu vaccines which were manufactured in chicken eggs. These innovations include adjuvant technology, which is designed to boost immune response, cell-based manufacturing processes which are designed to produce an exact match to the strains selected by the WHO, recombinant platforms and higher-antigen doses – with many new technologies under development and expected to reach the market in the coming years.
At Seqirus, we are far along in developing a product combining our adjuvant and cell-based vaccine technologies that are available now in the marketplace, reimagining how to best use them to bolster their effectiveness. Our innovation pipeline also includes developing a flu vaccine using a next-generation self-amplifying mRNA platform, sa-mRNA, that allows us to create strong immune responses at a fraction of the dose in comparison to traditional mRNA vaccines.
Innovation in the space is evolving to meet increased demand and ease the burden of infectious disease on people and health systems. We are seeing a rise in the vaccine product of choice, largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, where the general public is not only more aware of the role vaccines play in public health, but also of the technologies that differ between them.
For example, Merriam-Webster named “vaccine” the 2021 word of the year for good reason: online searches for “vaccine” grew by 600 percent from 2020.3 Vaccines have become a topic of dinner table conversation around the world and unlike ever before, people now take an active interest in the manufacturer, makeup and efficacy of their vaccines.
Having choices and knowing the differences between those choices is a positive thing. That is why we are pleased to bring several vaccine options to market which offer unique benefits to various populations, including vulnerable populations like infants 6 months of age and older, children and adults ages 65 and older.
What separates Seqirus from other vaccine manufacturers is that for us, it’s all about influenza. This singular focus, coupled with our deep history in understanding the unique challenges of influenza, allows us to be a leader in technology innovation and helps us evolve vaccines to meet customer needs.
While influenza is seasonal, Seqirus has no “off-season,” as we produce vaccines for both the Southern and Northern Hemispheres. For each hemisphere, half of our year is dedicated to manufacturing and shipping our vaccines, and the following half is spent looking ahead to the next season and applying our learnings, asking, “How can we innovate better in the research and development, production and distribution of our flu vaccines?” This gives us the ability to constantly measure our performance, retooling and evolving to do it over again, a practice that is found in every function of the company.
Even with an increased public focus on vaccines, our commitment hasn’t changed – we know we have a great responsibility to continue innovating to protect as many people as possible from the threat of influenza. By looking at our previous developments, rebuilding and resolving to improve, we hope to better protect future generations and give them the framework to continue innovating.
1https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
2https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/vaccineeffect.htm
3https://www.npr.org/2021/11/29/1059795123/merriam-webster-word-of-the-year-2021-vaccine