The review made clear that the federal government must do a better job nurturing discoveries in their earliest stages to push them to greater maturity. Therefore, HHS will be creating new teams at the National Institutes of Health to identify promising research and facilitate its translation into vaccines, drugs, and treatments that keep Americans safe.

The review placed a special focus on the federal government's flu response, identifying a need to upgrade flu vaccine manufacturing - from modernizing ways to test a vaccine's strength, known as potency, to new methods to show that the vaccine is safe, as well as ways to produce the early "seed virus" for vaccines faster. Taken together, this will shave weeks of time off vaccine manufacturing. HHS will make investments in these areas as a result of the review.

The review also found that private companies have difficulty attracting investors in countermeasures where there is little or no market for these products outside of that currently needed for government stockpiles. As a result of this finding, HHS will explore ways to help small companies attract investors to develop promising countermeasures that have multi-use potential.

The HHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response led the review. All federal agencies working with medical countermeasures participated, including the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, and HHS divisions of ASPR and ASPR's Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration. The review also incorporated input from state and local health departments, two federal advisory committees of outside experts, industry groups, venture capital experts, and the Institute of Medicine.

Read the review and its recommendations at www.hhs/secretary/.

hhs/news