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Het bericht van Fortune:
25 BREAKOUT COMPANIES 2005
Crucell
Technology: Cells for vaccine production
Sector: Biotech
Headquarters: Leiden, Holland
Website:
www.crucell.com If the deadly bird flu simmering in Southeast Asia boils up into a pandemic, demand for influenza vaccines will explode. So will Crucell's stock price. The company offers a line of human cells that's emerging as a key ingredient for making the vaccines. Currently vaccine production entails growing flu viruses in fertilized chicken eggs; the viruses are extracted, deactivated, and processed into flu shots. The eggs come from high-tech poultry farms that would be hard to expand fast. Boosting vaccine production with Crucell's methods would be relatively easy—its cells, in which flu viruses thrive, are kept in big vats called bioreactors that can be readily multiplied to expand capacity.
Recently the U.S. government awarded $97 million to Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccine unit of Sanofi Aventis, to fund its transition to Crucell technology for making flu vaccines in the U.S. The process is also being used to develop vaccines for malaria, Ebola virus, and West Nile virus. Crucell is hawking its technology to make many other bioengineered medicines too. A raft of drugmakers, including GlaxoSmithKline and Roche, have licensed its "PER.C6" cells for that purpose. If enough customers follow suit, Crucell's investors won't have to wait for a flu pandemic to see the stock take off. — David Stipp