QDIS Blog

Today the Washington Post had an article on Novartis recalling over 500,000 doses of flu vaccine intended for use in children.

500,000 Flu-Shot Doses Recalled - washingtonpost.com

The first thing to point out is the vaccines are not dangerous but had been frozen while under the control of Cardinal Health, so the problem was not with Novartis. Freezing will deactivate the vaccine so it isn’t dangerous but it would likely not protect against the seasonal flu. However, Novartis recalled all vaccine to be absolutely safe and will be replacing it. The new vaccines should be available by early November and will be handled by another distributor obviously.

I find this to be the kind of reaction that is admirable on behalf of Novartis and is to be applauded. It should also be noted that the product is labeled as from Chiron who was acquired by Novartis earlier this year.

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QD Information Services (QDIS) offers a variety of alerting services for anyone needing to stay up to date with rapidly changing information. If you need recurring searches or news following a given company industry or topic, QDIS can provide those results in a variety of formats.

Feel free to contact me with any questions and comments you might have about setting up these alert services for your company.

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A recent article I read commetned on the contract manufacturing reaching $26 billion by 2011.

Contract manufacturing biz to exceed $26bn

The article is an interesting read but merely reiterates what is already know; that outsourcing til now has been done by large pharma to improve efficiency and lower costs. They also point out that with numerous blockbuster drugs going off patent that generics will see growth in the near future.

The Biotech area is looking at growth approaching 30% and this will continue for the foreseeable future. More big pharma companies are getting into biotech usually by buying up other companies or expanding their own capacity. It will be interesting to keep an eye on how this capacity changes in the next few years. There is currently little excess capacity and it will be be worth tracking how the need tracks with the capacity over the next five years or so.

Technorati Tags: biotech capacity, contract manufacturing

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