The U.S. government awarded $60 million to researchers and companies today to develop vaccine adjuvants -- substances designed to boost the immune response and can help stretch short vaccine supplies, Reuters reported. "The goal of these awards is to find safe new adjuvants that will boost the effectiveness of vaccines," Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, which awarded the grants. "Adjuvants can be used not only to enhance the immune response to a vaccine and thereby offer better protection but also to extend the vaccine supply if needed, enabling more people to be vaccinated with fewer doses," Fauci said in a statement. The five-year contracts went to six researchers, including one from Corixa Corp. of Hamilton, Montana, a unit of Britain-based drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline. Other awards went to researchers at the University of Michigan, the University of California San Diego, the University of Kansas, the University of Washington School of Medicine, and Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York. Currently, the only vaccine adjuvant approved for use in the United States is an aluminum mixture known as alum, which is not used in flu vaccines because it does a poor job at boosting the immune response. Adjuvants are widely used in flu vaccines in Europe, including vaccines made by Glaxo and Novartis. The World Health Organization promotes the use of adjuvants because they can stretch the short supply of vaccine for H1N1 swine flu vaccine, making more shots available to needy countries. WHO says the global capacity to make influenza vaccines is about 3 billion doses a year -- not enough to cover the population of 6.8 billion people.
