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: Vaccines are hot. The global vaccine market, which was earlier thought as a low margin, low growth industry, is now attracting the interest of all major pharmaceutical giants. Market is already seeing growth rates faster than the traditional pharmaceutical market. With many new blockbuster potential vaccines likely to hit the market, the growth is only expected to increase.

The global vaccine market is set to almost double by the year 2010—it is expected to reach $21.05 billion by 2010 from $11.42 billion in 2006—fuelled by unprecedented product innovations and global recognition of the benefits of immunisation. But just a few years ago, vaccine makers were leaving the field, citing low profits and high production costs. Now, new vaccines are hitting the market in adult, therapeutic and influenza vaccine segments.

With healthcare reforms underway in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Indian vaccine makers are bidding on capitalising the opportunity round the corner. In the last couple of years, it has become possible to produce new types of vaccines, which consist of smaller entities of the disease-provoking micro organisms, such as proteins, peptides, and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). The advantages of the new vaccines are improved efficacy, less side-effects and at the same time, preventing the risk of catching the disease.

In addition, domestic vaccine makers are looking to strengthen their operations—research and development (R&D) as well as marketing—to capitalise on opportunities emerging from Asia, Africa and Latin America. The pressures of rising costs for the global vaccine manufacturers has enabled the regional vaccine manufacturers from places like India to enter into the global vaccines market and has also provided them the platform to expand their presence.

Thus, biotech vaccines are starting to push back the conventional ones. The days of injecting a single shot to keep diseases, says cholera, tetanus, hepatitis or measles, are gone.

Instead, what we have in the market are combination vaccines that are easy to administer, cheap and extremely effective.

Also, researchers are going beyond the lab levels and now to space-based research. A recent report from BioSpace Technologies says that biotech research has taken a giant leap following the launch of a Nasa shuttle containing an experiment for development of a Salmonella vaccine. Researchers believe that the conditions in space, particularly the microgravity, provide a superior environment for the development of a Salmonella vaccine.