Kelly RB Sporer, Jenna L. Carter and Paul M Coussens
Influenza viruses cause global seasonal epidemics with the potential to cause widespread illness and mortality. Vaccination is the single best approach to prevent serious illness caused by influenza infection; however, the current egg-based vaccination technology possesses many drawbacks despite being a robust method for over 60 years. Cell culture-based vaccine production systems possess many advantages over the current method. Over the last ten years, our research group has developed and improved upon an immortalized chick embryo cell line that has shown promise as a possibility for influenza vaccine production. The purpose of this short communication is to briefly review the development of cell lines to produce influenza vaccines, focusing on our group’s work with the PBS-1 and PBS-12SF lines.