Glaxo Plans Five Vaccines Over Five Years

GlaxoSmithKline aims to launch five major vaccines over the next five years targeting markets that could reach $18 billion by 2010, Europe’s biggest drug maker said Thursday.

The company also plans to double manufacturing capacity in Dresden, Germany, for its flu shot Fluarix to 80 million doses a year by 2008 in order to supply the U.S. market.

Vaccines have long been viewed as a low-growth, low-price business, but Glaxo says this is changing with the arrival of new technologies. Some of its new vaccines will become pharmaceutical blockbusters with sales above $1 billion a year, the company says.

“The global vaccines market is now poised for accelerated growth,” David Stout, Glaxo president of pharmaceutical operations, told reporters during a vaccines seminar in London.

Most attention is focused on Cervarix, Glaxo’s big new hope for preventing cervical cancer.

It will compete with Merck & Co.’s experimental product Gardasil, which is further along in the process of getting to market.

Cervarix has been touted by industry analysts as a potential $4-billion-a-year seller. Many analysts now expect Glaxo to seek approval from the Food and Drug Administration in 2007, although it might be able to apply in 2006 if clinical trials progress rapidly.

Like Gardasil, the vaccine targets a sexually transmitted infection called human papillomavirus, which causes cervical cancer, the second-biggest cancer killer in women.

Although Cervarix alone has the potential to transform Glaxo’s vaccine business, the company also has high hopes for four other major new vaccines that are scheduled for launch by 2010.

They include Rotarix, for preventing a common cause of severe diarrhea in children called rotavirus.

Glaxo also is pursuing a vaccine for pneumococcal disease known as Streptorix as well as new vaccine combinations against meningitis and an improved flu vaccine.