Venter and his colleagues are working with Novartis and the National Institutes of Health to synthesize cassettes--clusters of genes that could be inserted into a synthetic genome--for every known flu virus in an effort to streamline the vaccine manufacturing process. They envision a system where, if a new strain such as H1N1 emerged, developing a vaccine would be as straightforward as shuffling genes encoding the relevant viral fragments into a synthetic genome. This could then yield a cell that could be used to quickly manufacture the product.
