GE Healthcare and Novavax Establish Collaboration To Develop and Market Pandemic Influenz...( * Collaboration aimed at enabling vac...),Health

* Collaboration aimed at enabling vaccine production facility commissioning

in half the time of a traditional egg-based facility. * Once established, such a vaccine facility could allow manufacturing of pandemic flu vaccine to commence within 12 weeks of the strain isolation

CHALFONT ST GILES, England and ROCKVILLE, Md., Dec. 10 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- GE Healthcare, a unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE), and Novavax Inc. (Nasdaq: NVAX), today announced a collaboration agreement to develop and market a pandemic influenza vaccine manufacturing solution for selected international countries. This collaboration leverages GE Healthcare's bioprocess solutions and design expertise and Novavax's virus- like particle (VLP) and manufacturing platform.

Health planners around the world are looking to increase manufacturing capacity and vaccine stockpiles to counter the threat of a global avian flu pandemic: the global demand for pandemic influenza vaccine has been reported as possibly approaching 13 billion doses, with current world capacity at best 2.4 billion doses.

"This collaboration is a great first example of GE Healthcare realizing its strategy of enabling affordable and safe vaccine production for countries that need to better prepare for emerging infectious diseases," said Peter Ehrenheim, President and CEO, GE Healthcare Life Sciences.

Novavax's VLP-based H5N1 pandemic flu vaccine is currently in Phase I/IIa clinical trials. The goal is that any required recombinant vacci
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