Meningitis vaccine HibTITER, acquired from Wyeth, has been licensed to Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma Corp. for the Japanese market.
Nuron Biotech acquired the vaccine from Wyeth, a subsidiary of Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) in January of last year. Wyeth stopped making the vaccine in 2004, according to a spokesman for the Exton, Pennsylvania-based biologics and vaccines company.
Currently, the market for Hib vaccines is dominated by Big Pharma companies Sanofi and Merck. GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE:GSK) is taking another crack at developing a Hib vaccine. Nuron Biotech wants to expand its markets for the vaccine and is relicensing the vaccine for the U.S. market — a move that requires approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
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“The HibTITER vaccine still represents a considerable global opportunity, especially in markets like Japan, where there is only one approved vaccine for Haemophilus influenza type b (Hib) bacteria, which is a potential life-threatening illness,” said Shankar Musunuri, CEO and founder of Nuron Biotech, in a press statement. “This agreement provides us with additional resources to accelerate our relaunch strategy of this first-in-class vaccine in the U.S. market.”
The Hib vaccine is one of several drugs that have experienced shortages in recent years. In 2007, a shortage of Hib vaccine caused alarm when Merck announced a recall of the drug. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1,000 to 3,000 cases of meningococcal disease are reported annually in the United States.
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