Cell culture-derived influenza vaccines from Vero cells: a new horizon for vaccine production

Abstract

In the 20th century, three influenza pandemics killed approximately 100 million people. The traditional method of influenza vaccine manufacturing is based on using chicken eggs. However, the necessity of the availability of millions of fertile eggs in the event of a pandemic has led research to focus on the development of cell culture-derived vaccines, which offer shorter lead-in times and greater flexibility of production. So far, the cell substrates being evaluated and in use include Vero, Madin-Darby canine kidney, PER.C6 and insect cells. However, Vero cells are the most widely accepted among others. This review introduces briefly the concepts of advanced cell culture-derived influenza vaccine production and highlights the advantages of these vaccines in terms of efficiency, speed and immunogenicity based on the clinical data obtained from different studies.

Cell substrates for the production of viral vaccines

“…Eggs are still largely used, particularly in the seasonal flu vaccine manufacturing [5]. However, they pose a number of limitations including risk of insufficient supply, time-consuming processes with inconsistent yields, high costs of manufacture, and the potential for allergic responses to egg-components [6][7][8].…”

Intranasal Inactivated Influenza Vaccines: a Reasonable Approach to Improve the Efficacy of Influenza Vaccine?

“…The efficacy of current vaccines can be improved by cell culture-derived vaccines (89)(90)(91)(92). Current vaccines are prepared from viruses grown in chicken eggs; however, vaccine viruses sometimes mutate during proliferation.…”

A single NS2 mutation of K86R promotes PR8 vaccine donor virus growth in Vero cells

“…Although the system has been used for decades, several inherent drawbacks exist, such as labor intensity, lengthy timeline, limited production capacity, antigenic changes and allergenic responses (Kistner et al, 1998;Vepachedu et al, 2012;Wright, 2008). Considering that one to two eggs are required to produce each vaccine dose, millions of eggs are required to produce a given influenza vaccine during the influenza season (Montomoli et al, 2012).…”

“…In contrast to an egg-based production system, a cell-based production system is easier to scale up, produces fewer changes in antigenicity and causes no allergenic responses (Hatz et al, 2012;Mochalova et al, 2003). Many cell lines have now been licensed for vaccine production, including Vero cells from an African green monkey kidney (Barrett et al, 2009;Kistner et al, 1998), MDCK cells from a canine kidney (Genzel et al, 2006) and PER.C6 cells from human retinoblasts (Montomoli et al, 2012;Pau et al, 2001). Among them, only Vero cells have been used to produce multiple human vaccines for decades, including the poliovirus and rabies virus vaccines (Montagnon et al, 1981).…”