Serum's plans will also push Sanofi and others to do more to help countries to transition from oral to injectable vaccines.
If it does, some of the credit may go to a 73-year-old billionaire horse-breeder from the Indian city of Pune: he wants to provide injectable polio vaccine at a loss at least for some time.The world has made much progress in the fight against polio, a dreaded disease which leaves infected children paralysed.
Some 200m of the world's flu shots come from six firms, only two of which are licensed to sell in the United States.One, the French-owned Aventis Pasteur of Swiftwater, Pennsylvania, is under contract for 55m shots of injectable vaccine.
Even where injectable vaccines are available, inhalants are often more desirable.
Several drugs to treat it are available, but their usefulness is limited either because the parasites have evolved resistance to them, or because they are too expensive.In the mid-1990s, the World Health Organisation (WHO) started testing an injectable form of paromomycin as a treatment for visceral leishmaniasis.
Costs will be shaved wherever possible, with the biggest saving coming from using clomiphene citrate, an oral drug that provides a modest boost to ovulation and costs just $12 per IVF attempt, instead of the standard injectable drugs, which cost thousands.Cut-price approaches will not be suitable for all couples, and success rates per IVF cycle may be lower.
But for the past decade they have had access to an injectable contraceptive called Depo-Provera, which they need take only once every three months.
Schering, another drug company, in collaboration with Eberhard Nieschlag's group at the Institute of Reproductive Medicine at the University of Münster, Germany, has also started trials using injectable hormones.
A two-drop dose of OPV costs between $0.10 and $0.13.But the injectable polio vaccine (IPV) is a better way to inoculate children against the disease: it is safer because it does not carry the live virus.
The second innovation is injectable lenses.
The injectable preparation Depo-Provera has had a particularly controversial history, having been referred for further study by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1974 , 1978 and 1984.
