Thailand will move one step closer to the forefront of the biotechnology industry when it opens its first plant to produce a vaccine using cell-culture technology.

Dr Thongchai Thavichachart, president of Thailand Centre of Excellence for Life Sciences, said the centre's board had just approved a Bt33-million grant for the Centre for Vaccine Development of Mahidol University to set up a plant to produce a vaccine for dengue fever. The money will be transferred to the university by the end of this month, he said.

Suthee Yoksan, director of Mahidol's vaccine centre, cheered the decision to approve the grant, saying it was great news for Thailand.

The plant will be the first one in the country to use cell-culture technology, the latest frontier in vaccine research, to produce a vaccine.

"The dengue vaccine will be the first vaccine Thais have created from the research-and-development stage in a laboratory to production of the final product on a large scale," he added.

The vaccine was discovered and developed by researchers at Mahidol and is being prepared for phase-III clinical trials. In phase-III trials, the final stage in the process, a vaccine or drug is tested on a large group of people.

Suthee said vaccine plants in Thailand relied on so-called mouse-brain derived technology, which was recently found to have the potential to be harmful to the human brain as a result of infections in mouse brains. There are a few cases every year, one to five worldwide, of people sustaining brain injuries due to the use of mouse-brain derived vaccines. Vaccine production plants in many developed countries are switching from mouse-brain derived technology to cell-culture technology, which uses only use human cells in the production process, he said.

A preliminary design for the plant has already been drafted, and once the money arrives the design details can be filled in, Suthee said.

The plant will be part of the preparations for the phase-III trial, which will require a large volume of vaccine, he said. It will be able to produce from 50,000 to 100,000 doses of the vaccine for the trial, which is expected to begin in a few years, he said.

If the phase-III trial proves the vaccine works and the Food and Drug Administration approves it, the plant will be able to expand production, Suthee said.

Research and development of the dengue vaccine began almost a decade ago with financing, in part, from the National Research Council of Thailand.

Dengue kills 100 to 120 Thai children every year, Suthee said. About 44,000 children were infected with the disease in Thailand last year. There is no vaccine to prevent an outbreak.

Pennapa Hongthong

The Nation