There are no medications to treat West Nile virus or vaccines to prevent infection.
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The virus used in vaccines is not the actual virus that infects people, but rather a hybrid that's been genetically modified to make it safer, and to give it the ability to multiply more quickly -- a crucial factor when it comes to manufacturing large quantities.
The technology, however, could be applied to other vaccines, such as those against influenza virus, or vaccines under development for TB and malaria or for existing vaccines administered in childhood.
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The incremental process involves finding a good vaccine candidate, reassessing and testing the virus, developing seed vaccines and ensuring their safety.
A. Henderson, who led the effort to eradicate smallpox, have pointed out that we can develop new vaccines without the virus.
The firm plans to use some of the smallpox proceeds to help develop its experimental vaccines for West Nile virus and dengue fever.
In the 1970s, the first vaccines made from weakened rabies virus grown in cell culture became available.
Both vaccines protect against human papilloma virus (HPV) types 16 and 18, which cause more than 70% of cervical cancer.
Novavax's vaccines utilize what are called virus-like particles--genetically engineered molecules designed to train the immune system to recognize a particular virus.
All influenza vaccines are made by growing influenza virus particles in chicken eggs before treating them in a way to kill (inactivate) or weaken the viruses.
Protein Sciences uses recombinant DNA technology to produce its vaccines using a single protein from the virus.
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For them, only injections of H1N1 and seasonal flu vaccines are appropriate, since they contain inactivated or dead virus.
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This year it has launched five new medicines and vaccines, including Januvia to treat diabetes and Gardasil to prevent the virus that causes cervical cancer.
Traditionally, vaccines were manufactured from the complete organism, such as an inactivated flu virus.
Protein subunit vaccines: Instead of training the immune system to recognize DNA, these vaccines train it to recognize bits of proteins that are part of the virus.
Scientists aiming to produce Aids vaccines face a variety of problems, not least the mutating nature of the virus.
Peptide vaccines: These also train the immune system to recognize proteins associated with the HIV virus.
Those orders are for vaccines made through traditional means: made from eggs that are injected with the flu virus.
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Following his guidelines, many nations are making large quantities of what they believe will be useful vaccines in the hope of defeating a possible pandemic of bird flu, should the virus spread from Asia.
Both vaccines work by inserting bits of HIV DNA into the human immune system using an innocuous virus.
Bacterial vaccines, which used modified bacteria to try to train the immune system to fight the HIV virus.
And because the virus came up fairly late in the time frame for preparing flu shots, we had a limited number of vaccines, and we had to decide who gets the vaccines first.
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Current vaccines must be refrigerated and require multiple boosters, making them difficult to administer in Africa - where the virus is endemic.
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