Manufacturing a miracle
Published: June 5, 2005
As visitors enter the clean room of the first-ever vaccine manufacturing plant in the southeastern United States, sweating under layers of protective clothing, they see little more than antiseptic white walls and gleaming stainless steel machinery.
But there is much more going on than meets the eye at the newest subsidiary of Nabi Biopharmaceuticals, the Boca Raton-based company that is the largest of Florida’s 81 biotech firms.
When Nabi opened the new $20 million state-of-the-art facility at the Boca campus of its corporate headquarters this weekend, the company dedicated itself to manufacturing a miracle: the first-ever vaccine to successfully fight infections caused by Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, a penicillin-resistant bit of nastiness that colonizes on the skin or in the nasal passages of one in every three people.
The bacterium is normally harmless. But when an increasingly common mutant form of Staphylococcus enters the bloodstream, it kills anywhere to 25 to 43 percent of its victims, according to medical studies.
“Thousands of people who enter hospitals for operations don’t come out alive because they contract these infections which have nothing to do with their surgeries,” Boca Raton Mayor Steven Abrams said this weekend. “It’s amazing to think this simple vaccine can save them.”
Abrams was one of dozens of federal, state, county and municipal officials who were raving about the vaccine plant after its grand opening on Thursday morning.
“With apologies to Scripps, we were doing biotech in Boca Raton before it was fashionable,” Abrams said. “We’ve been known in the past as a fraud capital. I look forward now to being on the map as the city that is saving lives around the world.”
Lt. Gov. Toni Jennings, who represented Gov. Jeb Bush at the opening, said the new plant would help Florida improve on its standing as the 11th largest center of biotech industry in America.
“We’d like to be first and we can work on it,” Jennings said, adding that the governor was committed to bringing more life sciences industries to the state.
Palm Beach County Commissioner Jeff Koons said he hoped the plant would encourage more biotech firms to set up shop not just in Florida, but here in the county.
“You see lots of spin-offs from these large companies growing like spores nowadays,” Koons said. “We’ve already got the Scripps Research Center and Nabi, which I didn’t even realize was the biggest in the state before Jennings mentioned it.”
The StaphVAX vaccine targets two types of the bacteria that are responsible for 85 percent of all infections, according to Nabi. But other strains of the bacteria are becoming increasingly common.
While Nabi has been testing its new vaccine strictly on more than 4,000 kidney dialysis patients – a medical group especially prone to Staph infections – company officials are also hoping to market the vaccine to babies and older patients hospitalized for replacement surgeries and heart procedures.
If the ongoing clinical tests are successful, the vaccine could be available at American drugstores next year, although Nabi’s financial whirlwind will depend almost entirely on the pending approval of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Nabi chairman Thomas H. McLain seems confident of the vaccine’s success. He predicted this weekend that half the federal budget would be spent on health care within his lifetime, and said the vaccines made at Nabi could help reduce that budget by keeping people out of the hospital.
According to officials, long-term hospitalization currently costs about $32,000 for each Staphylococcus patient and about $34 billion a year for Americans overall.
McLain said the new 12,000-square-foot vaccine plant, loaded with all the latest vaccine manufacturing equipment, is already the most sophisticated in the world for addressing those costs through a focus on preventative medicine.
The “health and very lives [of Americans] will benefit from the vaccines we’re manufacturing right here in Boca Raton,” McLain said.
The new plant will also produce NicVAX, a vaccine being developed by Nabi to fight nicotine addictions, as well as the company’s next generation of Gram-positive pipeline vaccine products.
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