DARPA’s Blue Angel – Pentagon prepares millions of vaccines against future global flu

DARPA’s Blue Angel – Pentagon prepares millions of vaccines against future global flu.

RT News The
Pentagon’s DARPA lab has announced a milestone, but it doesn’t involve
drones or death missiles. Scientists at the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency say they’ve produced 10 million doses of an influenza
vaccine in only one month’s time.

In a press release out of the agency’s office this week, scientists
with DARPA say they’ve reach an important step in being able to combat a
flu pandemic that might someday decimate the Earth’s population. By
working with the Medicago Inc. vaccine company, the Pentagon’s cutting
edge research lab says that they’ve used a massive harvest of tobacco
plants to help produce a plethora of flu-fighting vaccines.

“Testing confirmed that a single dose of the H1N1 VLP influenza
vaccine candidate induced protective levels of hemagglutinin antibodies
in an animal model when combined with a standard aluminum adjuvant,” the agency writes, while still noting, though, that “The
equivalent dose required to protect humans from natural disease can
only be determined by future, prospective clinical trials.”

Researchers have before relied on using chicken eggs to harvest
compounds to use in influenza vaccines. With a future outbreak requiring
scientists to step up with a solution as soon as possible, though,
they’ve turned to tobacco plants to help produce the vaccines.

“Vaccinating susceptible populations during the initial stage of a pandemic is critical to containment,” Dr. Alan Magill, DARPA program manager, says in an official statement. “We’re
looking at plant-based solutions to vaccine production as a more rapid
and efficient alternative to the standard egg-based technologies, and
the research is very promising.”

The World Health Organization has gone on the record to say that as
much as half of the people on the planet could be affected by a pandemic
in the near future, and it could take as much as nine months for a
vaccine for a pandemic virus strain to become made available. With the
lives of billions of people across the world at stake, DARPA has been
trying to determine new ways of churning out antidotes in as little time
as possible. Now its researchers say, that in only a month, scientists “produced
more than 10 million doses (as defined in an animal model) of an H1N1
influenza vaccine candidate based on virus-like particles (VLP).”

Through DARPA’s previously established Blue Angel program,
researchers have spent several years searching for new ways to produce
mass quantities of vaccine-grade protein that could be used to combat
what they say are very real emerging and novel biological threats.

Andy Sheldon, Chief Executive Officer of Medicago , says in the company’s own press release that “The
completion of the rapid fire test marks a substantial achievement in
demonstrating our technology and the potential for Medicago to be the
first responder in the event of a pandemic flu outbreak.”

Medicago’s research was conducted in a 97,000-square-foot vaccine
facility in North Carolina that was funded through a $21 million
Technology Investment Agreement with DARPA.




Source:-
http://fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/darpas-blue-angel-pentagon-prepares-millions-of-vaccines-against-future-global-flu/18458/