It's the flu season once again. Although you can take all the necessary precautions to prevent yourself from catching it, one of the best defenses is getting a flu shot.
The newest flu shot from Novartis, however, is going to be a lot different: the lab has used kidney cells of dogs to grow the virus.
In an article published in Time on Thursday, October 30, Novartis has just shipped a good number of flu vaccines just in time for this season, where flu incidence is often high, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. The new vaccine is called Flucelvax, which has been approved in 2012 by the Food and Drug Administration. A year after, the company had released a limited amount of it.
Unlike the other flu vaccines they had produced, the virus in Flucelvax grows in dogs' kidney cells, which the lab favors for a number of reasons.
One, they can easily mass-produce the vaccine. It takes about half a year to grow flu viruses in chicken eggs. With the kidney cells, they can do that in only 75 hours or less. This ability will be even more important in time of a flu epidemic. It can be recalled that the biggest medical disaster in history is the Spanish flu, which killed around 5% of the world's population, including those in the United States.
Second, they can greatly reduce or eliminate the chances of users developing allergic reactions to flu vaccines. There are many who develop allergies to chicken eggs.
Moreover, the likelihood of producing pure flu vaccines is high with this new method. The quality of chicken eggs greatly differs, which also affects the kind and effectiveness of the flu vaccine the lab produces.
Based on their clinical trial, the level and amount of antibodies from flu vaccines grown in dog kidney cells are no different from those coming from chicken eggs. The effective rate is at 84% compared to placebo.