Meningitis vaccine licensed to Mitsubishi Tanabe for Japan

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.