The Quest to End the Flu

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http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/12/the-quest-to-end-the-flu/354677/

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On April 28, 2009, a box containing a newly isolated virus showed up at Doris Bucher’s lab. She and her colleagues at New York Medical College opened it up right away. Thousands, or perhaps millions, of lives might depend on what they did next.

The virus was a new kind of influenza, known as 2009 H1N1. It had abruptly started spreading across North America in the previous month, and was beginning to appear in countries around the world. Once scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed it, they realized that the vaccine already in production for the next flu season probably wouldn’t be effective against it. And because it was so new, people’s immune systems might also be unable to stop the virus, which meant that it could become a global outbreak—a pandemic.

No one knew how bad 2009 H1N1 might prove to be, but the experts did know that the virus had the capacity to be very bad. Flu pandemics had occurred three times in the previous century, and the worst of them, the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918–19, had killed an estimated 50 million people. It, too, was an H1N1 virus. Once researchers at the CDC got hold of the 2009 H1N1 virus, they had one urgent mission: make a new vaccine.

The first step was to send batches of the virus to a handful of vaccine experts like Bucher. As soon as she received her supply of 2009 H1N1, she got to work on creating a “seed stock” of modified viruses that could be used to produce hundreds of millions of vaccine doses. Manufacturers for the most part still make flu vaccines the way they did in World War II: in chicken eggs. Bucher had to transform the viruses, which grow very well in human airways, so that they would grow very well in eggs.