In honor of World AIDS Day, ASEE would like to extend its condolences to the millions of people who are afflicted by this horrible and devastating epidemic. Issues of funding have long plagued the end to this disease. However, some progress has been made since the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation identified the 14 Grand Challenges in Global health. One of the top priorities in these challenges involves engineering an HIV vaccine that is easily replicated and then distributed to the areas of the world that need it the most. One of the major roadblocks in developing a vaccine that meets these criteria, however, is making the scale of production economically feasible while still maintaining quality. According to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative,

As product development moves forward, a key question for developers is whether a promising vaccine concept can actually be produced effectively and affordably as a candidate vaccine. The design and implementation of a vaccine manufacturing process – known as “bioprocess development” – requires a wide range of chemical and mechanical engineering, biochemistry, and microbiology skills….

To meet regulatory requirements, a developer must devise a process that can produce vaccine in the relatively small amounts needed for trials and also develop a process that can produce the amounts needed for large-scale use. But increasing the scale of a manufacturing process is not just a matter of a larger supply of ingredients and bigger equipment. Many manufacturing processes vary in non-linear ways as scale increases and as a result, technical processes that work in small volumes in a laboratory may not work at large scales….

At large scales of production, small differences in yields or manufacturing efficiency can have a major impact on costs. Getting the process right for a particular vaccine is crucial to its profitability for developers and its affordability for users.

Click here for the full brief on the obstacles engineers and scientists face in developing an HIV vaccine.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 1st, 2005 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.