Building a Better Smallpox Vaccine

The threat of germ warfare leaves governments with a terrible dilemma. Failing to vaccinate entire populations against bioterrorist attacks could lead to the type of epidemic envisaged in a U.S. simulation called Dark Winter, which suggested that a smallpox outbreak that began in Oklahoma City could spread to 25 states and 15 other countries within two weeks. But inoculating everyone with the most common smallpox vaccine would leave hundreds dead from side effects and thousands more with brain damage.

Enter Danish scientist Peter Wulff, the 47-year-old CEO of Bavarian Nordic, a biopharmaceutical company in Copenhagen. Along with his team of immunologists, virologists and molecular biologists, Wulff has spent the last four years working on a smallpox vaccine that would be safe for those most at risk from side effects, including small children, the elderly, cancer patients and people who are HIV positive. Bavarian Nordic's version of the Modified Vaccinia Ankara strain of the vaccine (MVA-BN) could either be used as a pre-vaccine to protect the at-risk population or be used by everyone in place of the old vaccine. Either way, it's a breakthrough.

"What we are doing is developing a whole new generation of smallpox vaccine," says Wulff, a renaissance man who is not only a biochemist and dedicated runner but who also worked as a patent attorney for the pharmaceutical industry before starting Bavarian Nordic, his second biotech venture, in 1994.

Like so many great discoveries, Bavarian Nordic's smallpox vaccine came about unintentionally, in this case from the company's research on HIV vaccines. Wulff and his collaborators wondered if an MVA vaccine, which was developed by a German government institute in Bavaria and used in the 1970s as a pre-vaccine to inoculate against smallpox, could be used as a starting point for an AIDS vaccine. Through its research Bavarian Nordic was able to improve on the German MVA vaccine, refining it into a stable form that does not use any bovine or human products, which the company says helps reduce the chance of causing serious side effects.

The company is currently testing its smallpox MVA vaccine on 90 healthy German male volunteers in phase one clinical trials. Wulff's hope is that governments will introduce a fast track procedure, allowing Bavarian Nordic to market the product quickly. Wulff says his company could produce 100 million doses of its MVA smallpox vaccine within 12 months at a cost of $4 per dose, half the amount big pharmaceutical firms say they will charge the U.S. government to produce stockpiles of the old vaccine. The reason they can do it so much cheaper is that Bavarian Nordic uses the same MVA vaccine as a base for all its business, so the master seed has already been produced and all the production equipment is already in place.

The renewed world demand for smallpox vaccines has forced Wulff to give up his dual role as the company's chief science officer, overseeing and helping drive the work in the lab. This month he handed that job over to another scientist on his team to make time for negotiating with government officials trying to protect their populations against bioterrorism.

But, says Wulff, "my heart will always be in the science." He is eager to get back to the lab to focus on perfecting the MVA vaccine in the treatment and eventual prevention of AIDS, a different sort of threat which continues to terrorize large portions of the world population.