Polysaccharide conjugate vaccines are very effective at preventing invasive disease caused by encapsulated bacterial species, such as meningococcus, pneumococcus and Haemophilus influenzae type B. Next generation vaccines recently approved against these agents have focused on increasing the valency of serotype coverage, creating a complex development, manufacturing and regulatory paradigm. Recently, we have concentrated on incorporating automation into lab scale models of some unit operations performed in full scale manufacture and increasing throughput to facilitate process characterization efforts. This talk will describe these efforts and how they fit into our overall development strategy for multivalent conjugate vaccines.
