The Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, announced today that the agency would be moving forward in its preparations for vaccine development. HHS is directing $1 billion in funds to be used to conduct clinical studies over the summer and to prepare for large-scale commercial production of a swine (H1N1) flu vaccine.

Also today, the CDC announced that a new study has found that the virus likely emerged from pigs, and that the influenza genes that make up the new virus had probably been circulating unnoticed in swine populations for at least a decade. The study concludes that hog operations will likely need increased monitoring for flu viruses in the future, and to prevent this swine flu virus from reemerging from pigs.

The good news from the study is that most of the new swine flu viruses in humans show a very similar genetic makeup. That means that it may be somewhat easier to develop  a vaccine that will be effective against the new H1N1 viruses now circulating. The CDC does note, however, that now that the virus is being transmitted in humans, they expect it to evolve more quickly than it had in pig populations.

Manufacturers have been speeding up development of the seasonal flu vaccine, to allow for the production of a potential swine flu vaccine for the fall. Government health agencies are also planning to augment the development of a traditional vaccine—which can take months to produce in chicken eggs—with a technology that uses mammal cells to develop a vaccine in weeks. Researchers are also studying the possibility of using reverse genetic technologies to produce a vaccine, according to a CDC spokesman.

—Kevin McCarthy, associate editor