Today my meeting with Mrs. Yates didn’t have a specific purpose because the test results she is waiting to show me do not come out until Thursday. Instead, we just met briefly and discussed some general information about vaccines and the pharmaceuticals industry.
https://theconversation.com/the-most-powerful-companies-youve-never-heard-of-merck-3187
She told me that Merck, which has buildings and labs located in Durham, currently produces Varicella, Shingrix, MMR, and Gardasil. Varicella is the chicken pox vaccine, Shingrix is the vaccine for the new strain of shingles, the MMR vaccine is the vaccine against measles, mumps, and rubella, and Gardasil is a new vaccine for HPV.
They only recently began producing Gardasil because it has been more popular on the market since it was recently approved for males. Previously it was only offered to females in two doses, once at 11 and again at 14. Now the clinical trials are complete and it is on the market for boys too.
Another thing I learned is that it is very common in pharmaceuticals for a drug created for one cause to end up being used for another cause. For example, Merck is the only facility in the world that makes Bacillus of Calmette and Guerin or BCG. BCG is a vaccine for a strain of Mycobacterium bovis that was approved for tuberculosis about 30 years ago. Today, doctors have found that it can cure bladder cancer if administered to bladder cancer patients. This is an amazing discovery that can save lives, but is more common that I thought. Another example is Viagra which was originally developed as a blood pressure drug, but during testing and clinical trials, male patients found that it treated erectile dysfunction. Now Viagra is solely marked as a drug for erectile dysfunction.
Merck is also converting a wing of a lab that produces Varicella into a place where they can make the Johnson and Johnson COVID-19 vaccine. Because of the low demand for Varicella and the high demand for COVID vaccines, the company has formed a strategic partnership with J&J and will begin manufacturing vaccines as soon as renovations are complete. A fun fact about the COVID vaccine: it has to be refrigerated at temperature as low as -70 degrees because it is an RNA vaccine and RNA is much more unstable of a structure than DNA, which can survive in regular refrigerated temperatures.
