A new mode of bird-flu fighting A small Malvern drugmaker has devised a way that may make vaccine faster, cheaper and more potent.

Rick Bright and his former colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have seen many companies jump on the avian-flu bandwagon, with a slew of potential treatments if a pandemic breaks out.

"I've heard so many things, so many wild ideas. I've seen it all," said Bright, a virologist and immunologist at the CDC's influenza branch for nine years.

But it is a small Malvern company, called Novavax Inc., that Bright says may have a viable solution to bird flu. The researcher recently left the CDC to take the helm of Novavax's vaccine research.

Drugmakers are racing to come up with new approaches to bird flu, as the lethal H5N1 strain has killed millions of birds and spread from Asia to Europe, Africa and the Middle East, killing more than 100 people. The virus is not yet transmissible among people.

Just eight months ago, Novavax had a money-losing estrogen lotion and shares trading at less than $1. But the drugmaker has had a remarkable change of fortune. For that it can thank avian-flu fears and a technology that may hold the promise of making an avian-flu vaccine faster, cheaper and more potent than conventional influenza vaccines.

"We are very excited about Novavax's approach," said Terry Tumpey, senior microbiologist at the CDC, which is working with more than a dozen smaller companies on new technologies to narrow the time it takes to make an avian-influenza vaccine.

Novavax has a different way of making flu vaccine, using virus-like-particle technology (VLP) that extracts protein genes from influenza virus and turns them into particles that mimic the virus and trick the immune system into creating antibodies.

The recombinant particles can be customized into a vaccine in about two to three months, instead of the six to nine months it takes to create a conventional flu vaccine in chicken eggs.

Other companies are developing VLP vaccines for AIDS, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and human papilloma virus. But no other company is using the technology for flu, and Novavax has pending patents, said president and chief executive officer Rahul Singhvi.

Since 2001, Novavax scientists have been working on an avian-flu vaccine with the CDC, using a grant of about $1 million from the National Institutes of Health.

In August, when preclinical results were published in the online edition of the journal Vaccine, Wall Street investors noticed. The stock rose from 87 cents Aug. 15 to $7.98 March 31, hitting a 52-week high of $8.31 March 20.