In the near term, the recent US government order for H1N1 pandemic flu vaccine with a novel adjuvant may suggest there is some hope for approval of Glaxo's Cervarix in the second half.
But recent years have seen a revival both of the vaccine industry in general and of the adjuvant side of things in particular.
Rino Rappuoli, the chief scientific officer at Chiron, is one of those working on a way to make vaccines protective at low doses by delivering the injection along with something called an adjuvant.
Alongside the virus are an antigen and an adjuvant, harmless substances that stimulate T-cell production.
A second study in the same journal was conducted in both Tanzania and Kenya, and it shows the vaccine is indeed improved by using a better adjuvant.
For example, they have spent eight decades adding alum to vaccines as what is known as an adjuvant.
Once built, they attached the new hapten molecules to carrier proteins, mixed them with adjuvant, injected the results into mice and waited.
Finally, there is a chemical cocktail called an adjuvant that helps get the immune system to pay attention to the carrier protein and the haptens.Dr Janda noticed that past experiments on methamphetamine vaccines had all revolved around tweaking either the carrier protein or the adjuvant, rather than tinkering with the haptens.
Dr Rappuoli says that if an adjuvant is used, half the normal flu dose would work.
They found that people who had received adjuvanted vaccine years ago are still significantly immune to the strain of bird flu currently circulating.The next step is to test a vaccine against H5N1, the current strain of bird flu, with an adjuvant.
This vaccine depends, according to Emmanuel Hanon, who helped develop it, on an oil-in-water-emulsion adjuvant so good that only a twentieth of the normal amount of antigen is needed.
