CAMBRIDGE, Mass, Oct 05, 2001 (The Boston Globe - Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News via COMTEX) -- For years, researchers at Acambis PLC labored in anonymity within the sprawling scientific community around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But yesterday, armed guards patrolled its offices and a veil of secrecy cloaked the staff.
Pentagon officials this week ordered Acambis to accelerate production of the smallpox vaccine, making the company the sole national supplier of protection against a potentially lethal contagion that federal officials rank among the leading bioterrorism threats.
The last documented smallpox case occurred in 1978, but US military officials believe ex-Soviet scientists might be aiding rogue nations in producing batches of the virus, which has killed at least 100 million people over five centuries.
Acambis's stock value has increased almost 40 percent since the Sept. 11 hijackings, but the company, which is headquartered in Britain, must now operate as an extension of the US military's war on terrorism rather than just another pharmaceutical firm.
"There's little I can say about our work anymore, in the interests of national security," said Gordon Cameron, president and chief financial officer. "It's created some difficulty for us to be a public company."
Cameron yesterday confirmed that Acambis plans to make 40 million doses of the vaccine, two years ahead of schedule, and may eventually stockpile enough to inoculate the entire US population. Currently, about 7 million doses exist in reserves, federal officials estimate.
Fear of bioterrorist attacks swelled following reports that the hijackers had sought to rent crop-duster airplanes. Federal officials scrambled to ensure that military needs could be met by the small collection of private firms, such as Acambis, that form the US bio-war industrial complex. The smallpox vaccine stockpile, however, is the only bioterrorism precaution reserved for the public.
Acambis is the only company in the world licensed to make the vaccine. Its US headquarters are in Cambridge, with a lab in Canton. The company does not store infectious strains of the virus, instead refining existing vaccine samples, said company officials. Warehouse locations around the country are tightly guarded secrets.
In the last week, federal officials stationed extra security at the Cambridge and Canton sites. The Centers for Disease Control checks in daily, said Acambis officials.
The increase in smallpox vaccine production began in 2000, when the Clinton administration awarded Acambis, then called OraVax, a 20-year, $343 million contract to produce 40 million vaccine doses beginning in 2004. No versions of the vaccine had been produced since the early 1980s.
Days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush administration officials contacted the firm, ordering production to be underway by early next year, according to Acambis officials.
The company will produce 10 million to 17 million doses a month, according to federal officials. It may continue until enough vaccine exists to immunize all 281 million people in the United States, said federal officials.
"That's the ultimate plan," said Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health, who will supervise testing of the new vaccine batches. "Not just stop at 30 or 40 million doses, but to at least have the capability that if we need to vaccinate everybody, we can."
Five other countries have asked Acambis to supply vaccine, though the company would not discuss specifics.
Federal health officials have also taken aggressive steps to hasten production of the anthrax vaccine, closely working with its sole US maker, Michigan-based BioPort.
The long-troubled company has been unable to pass federal safety inspections for three years, but federal officials this week said the company would be cleared within weeks.
Smallpox is spread through face-to-face contact by inhaling droplets of the virus. Its early symptoms, which can take weeks to emerge, include fever, vomiting, and delirium. Then come tiny pink skin spots which grow into fluid-filled blisters that harden into crusts. The disease kills 20 to 40 percent of those who catch it, leaving many more with extensive scars.
Vaccination before exposure, or within three days of infection, gives almost total protection. Vaccination within five days after infection can still protect against death.
After a global vaccination push in the 1960s and '70s, the only confirmed remaining strains of the virus are kept under heavy security at a CDC lab in Atlanta and the State Centre for Research on Virology and Biotechnology in Siberia.
The Soviet germ warfare program employed 30,000 people to work on strains of smallpox, anthrax, ebola, and other deadly pathogens. After Soviet communism collapsed, many scientists lost their jobs. US intelligence officials have said many unemployed scientists have gone on to work for germ warfare programs in Iraq and other regimes hostile to the United States.
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