Developing a vaccine against any illness is difficult and time-consuming, but the need for rapid vaccine production becomes even more important against emerging infectious diseases like H1N1 flu. One of the biggest hurdles in creating an influenza vaccine has to do with the virus itself. “In conventional vaccine-making, you need the actual virus that causes the disease,” says Phil Dormitzer, who leads a team of vaccine researchers at Novartis. “The bottleneck has been for a vaccine manufacturer to get its hands on a suitable vaccine virus.”