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CHICAGO: A U.S. researcher at work developing a vaccine for swine flu said he hopes to have it ready for testing in mice in two to three weeks.
Suresh Mittal, at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, said the vaccine could be ready for production in a few months.
"We would like to have a vaccine in two to three weeks to start testing in mice," said Mittal, a professor of comparative pathobiology in the School of Veterinary Medicine.
Bird flu technique
Mittal and collaborators at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will use a method he developed for dealing with the H5N1 bird flu to accelerate work on the H1N1 swine flu.
They will use a common cold virus to carry a gene of the H1N1 flu virus and stimulate cells to create both antibodies and cell-based protection that will guard against mutated forms of the flu virus.
"The adenovirus is incapable of replicating and does not seem to cause disease in humans," Mittal said. "That makes it a suitable virus to work with for flu vaccines."
The vaccine his team created for the bird flu worked on three different strains isolated over a seven-year period and was described in papers in the Journal of Infectious Diseases and Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics.
One of several efforts
A number of different institutions, both private and public, are working on the development of a vaccine for swine flu.
The latest WHO figures show 2,371 cases of influenza A(H1N1) infections have been reported by 24 countries, not including Brazil and Argentina which reported their first cases on Thursday. Forty-six people have died; 44 of them in Mexico and two in the United States.
"If things go well, and we achieve full scale production, it will be several months until the vaccine will be available," a spokesman for the CDC cautioned.
