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Washington has urged countries to be more transparent about their efforts to clamp down on the threat of bioweapons. But U.S. officials have also resisted calls for an international verification system — akin to that for nuclear weapons — saying it is too complicated to monitor every lab's activities.
DARPA Effort Speeds Biothreat Response
New vaccine technologies not only will speed the U.S. government response to infectious diseases, but also will give officials better options for fighting bioterror attacks, a DOD scientist said.
For the largest program, called AMP for Accelerated Manufacture of Pharmaceuticals, companies in four states are building facilities where they can quickly produce vaccine-grade proteins grown in the cells of tobacco plants. Once they produce the proteins, the goal is for each company to scale up its process to produce 100 million doses of H1N1 flu vaccine per month. Existing vaccine manufacturers worldwide produce a fraction of that -- about 300 million doses of vaccine in six months, Magill said.
Vaccines are produced in steps, beginning with getting a sample of the active virus. From the original virus, “seeds” are used to grow the virus in hundreds of millions of chicken eggs -- a time-consuming process developed more than 50 years ago. After the virus particles are grown, they’re purified to make vaccine.
AMP set out to speed up the process by looking at a range of animals and plants whose cells could produce high-quality proteins that would work well in people, Magill said. What emerged from the first round of experiments were tobacco plants.
Originally posted by bone13
reply to post by mik3ymik3
Bioweapon tech is not new, its been around since the 1920's Germany, Japan, Russia and YES the United States have had and did do keep Top Secret labs remember the utah incident earlyer this year, a vail of X, a liquid that kill a 100000 people an hour was "misplace" and found outside the lab, still in stock pile, so wake up this liquid if it become airborne, gets in the water will kill 10 million people in a month.edit on 8-12-2011 by bone13 because: (no reason given)