Cooking Up Millions Of Viruses For A New Vaccine

Research assistants at New York Medical College on Tuesday prepared to harvest swine flu virus that had been grown in eggs. Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times

From The New York Times:

VALHALLA, N.Y. — As soon as Doris Bucher learned that a new strain of swine flu had turned up in the United States, she e-mailed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offering to send materials that might be useful in making a vaccine.

Her colleagues at the C.D.C. had a better idea. Less than a week later, they sent a sample of the new type of virus, influenza A(H1N1), to Dr. Bucher, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at New York Medical College.

Dr. Bucher, a cheerful, fast-talking scientist who has been involved in flu research for 40 years, runs a laboratory here in Westchester County that is highly regarded for its skill at turning flu viruses into “seed stock” — a form of the virus that will grow rapidly in eggs so that drug companies can use it to make hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine.

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