Specialty Vaccines for Infectious Diseases
Developing specialty vaccines for emerging and overlooked infectious diseases is a challenging and rewarding enterprise with specific problems and opportunities. Large companies have not historically prioritized this area and instead have focused on the development and commercialization of routine vaccines and vaccines for diseases with more significant global markets.
There are many problems in developing specialty vaccines for emerging and overlooked infectious diseases, namely in financing and R&D.
Investments in specialty vaccines for overlooked infectious diseases are likely to be labeled as risky. This is due not only to attrition rates in vaccine R&D, but also due to the size, location, and severity of outbreaks, which are difficult to predict. Companies have little certainty in regard to the market potential of newly developed vaccines. With that said, there is still a significant unmet need, and specialty vaccines are needed to protect against the public health threat that these overlooked infectious diseases represent.
Unfortunately, there are very few companies that focus only on vaccines and even less, with a fully integrated model covering not only the manufacturing but also the commercialization of the product.
However, although the development of specialty vaccines can be considered a risky enterprise, it also has tangible benefits. Smaller companies, such as PaxVax, have found a niche in the market, developing a scalable infrastructure to stimulate the development of the vaccine. The company’s success points to a largely untapped opportunity for pharma looking to invest in a growing market, which means that there are prerequisites to hope for solving problems in the development and commercialization of specialty vaccines.
Source: Fiercepharma.