WHO spearheads new initiative for mRNA bird flu vaccine advancement

The World Health Organization has launched an initiative to create vaccinations for bird flu in low-income countries, utilizing advanced messenger RNA technology.


The WHO stated that Argentinian producer Sinergium Biotech will lead the project and had already began producing candidate H5N1 vaccinations.

The bird flu H5N1 originally appeared in 1996, but since 2020, outbreaks in birds have increased exponentially, as has the virus’s spread to mammals, including cattle on US ranches and a few humans.

This has raised concerns that the virus could start a future epidemic.
Sinergium intends to demonstrate proof-of-concept in preclinical models for its potential vaccines, according to the WHO.

Once the preclinical data is complete, the technology, materials, and experience will be shared with a network of manufacturers in developing nations, allowing them to speed up their own development and manufacturing.

The UN health agency stated that the effort would be implemented under the mRNA technology transfer plan it developed with the UN-backed Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) in 2021, during the height of the Covid-19 crisis.

That effort aimed to assist low- and middle-income nations, which were significantly underserved during the epidemic, in developing and producing their own mRNA vaccines.

The technique guides the body to manufacture a distinct protein that triggers an immune response, educating it to fight the illness.

Quickly developed mRNA Covid vaccinations were game changers during the epidemic, but they also exposed obvious worldwide vaccine inequities and calls for fairer distribution, despite efforts to apply the technology to other diseases.


“This initiative exemplifies why WHO established the mRNA Technology Transfer Programme,” the agency’s chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, stated.

That program, which has 15 industrial partners in nations ranging from South Africa to Ukraine to Vietnam, was designed to “encourage greater research, development, and production in low- and middle-income countries,” he stated.

So that “when the next pandemic arrives, the world will be better prepared to mount a more effective and more equitable response” .

Avian influenza viruses are among those thought to have the potential to start a future pandemic.

According to the WHO, there are a number of traditional influenza vaccinations that have already been licensed for pandemic use and might be adapted to tackle H5N1 if it spreads.

However, Martin Friede, the chief of the WHO’s vaccine research section, believes that focusing on producing mRNA-based vaccines is especially interesting when it comes to establishing long-term production capacity.

Previous initiatives to increase influenza vaccine production in developing countries had frequently failed, with factories focused solely on egg-based pandemic influenza vaccines closing after the threat had passed and governments had stopped obtaining the doses.

“The advantage of mRNA is that, in theory, we can make a Covid vaccine, we can make H5N1 vaccines, but also many other vaccines and importantly also therapeutics,” Friede explained to the media.
Instead of ceasing manufacture of H5N1 vaccinations or other jabs, he stated that “we hope that all of the partners will be able to produce something else”.

He stated that half of the program’s manufacturers have already begun building the necessary technology to design and manufacture mRNA-based vaccinations, allowing them to respond much more quickly if calamity strikes again.