BioShield Woes

Well this is not very comforting news. The government BioShield program was supposed to stockpile drugs agains anthrax, botulism and smallpox but we are not there yet. Even when we've created the stockpile, there are many doubts that this is the right approach. Rather than targeting individual bugs and hoping we guess right, many believe we should be researching broad spectrum remedies - the very ones that drug companies don't pursue because there is no profit in it. In other words, something the government should be doing even without a terrorist threat.

From Wired:

"By now, millions of anthrax vaccine shots developed through cutting-edge genetic engineering were supposed to be filling a new national stockpile of biodefense drugs. Instead, five years after anthrax attacks left five dead, sickened 17 and panicked the country, the nearly $1 billion contract awarded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to a tiny and struggling San Francisco Bay Area biotechnology company is plagued with misfortune and delays.

Delivery has been put off until at least 2008 -- and maybe later -- while the government and VaxGen trade barbs over who is at fault. The dispute has further tarnished Project Bioshield, a government program that has alienated many potential biodefense contractors."

From New Scientist:

"The Department of Homeland Security must first decide what "designated threats" to target - and then the Department of Health commissions drugs or vaccines designed to protect against them. So far the diseases it has picked extend to anthrax, botulism and smallpox.

This targeted "one bug, one drug" approach is, however, seen by some biodefence specialists as fundamentally misguided. Ken Alibek, head of the Soviet and then Russian bacterial weapons programme until 1992, says it allows attackers to create pathogens that evade or resist each remedy as fast as it is developed. "Based on the former Soviet model, it takes three to four years to engineer a drug-resistant or more virulent pathogen," he says. "It takes 10 to 15 years to develop a vaccine and have it approved." Jonathan Tucker of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a think tank in Washington DC, agrees. "It is myopic to focus on the designated threat organisms," he says, "especially when the bigger threat is probably from natural disease."

A better approach, these critics say, would be to aim for broad-spectrum remedies that work against many different bacteria or viruses. That would be more cost-effective, offer a blanket defence against terrorists whatever their choice of bioweapon, and come with the huge additional benefit of protecting against natural diseases too. "If something works for flu and for bioweapons as well, why not do that?" says Tucker."