Developing a safe and effective vaccine could take a year, WHO Assistant Director Bruce Aylward said, and it would take six to nine months just to confirm whether Zika is the actual cause of the birth defects, or if the two are just associated.
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The virus, which is spread through mosquito bites, can cause fever, rash and joint pain, and has been linked to serious birth defects. Meanwhile, public health officials said government researchers were working on at least two approaches to a vaccine and hoped to begin testing one of them in early clinical trials by the end of this year. “It could be cranked to very high levels in a really short time”.
Dr Anne Schuchat of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, said there have been 31 cases of Zika infection among US citizens who travelled to areas affected by the virus. Once the company establishes a safety profile of the vaccine, it will move into human testing, which can be expected as soon as the end of this year. The stock surged as the company announced that it is entering clinical trials for its MERS vaccine, which appears to hold promise in targeting the Zika virus. Fauci said researchers were also eager to develop a rapid test to assess whether a person had been infected with Zika, to help pregnant women, in particular, find out if they have had the disease.
In a separate interview with Fortune on Thursday, Inovio CEO J. Joseph Kim said the company has created a DNA strand that can potentially prevent the virus. Kobinger is the lead scientist from Laval University and is working with Inovio, GeneOne Life Sciences and the University of Pennsylvania on the Zika vaccine.
GlaxoSmithKline Plc (NYSE:GSK), Sanofi and Inovio are among the few drugmakers racing to develop a vaccine against the rapidly spreading Zika Virus. “We need to take actions now”, Chan said, referring to the condition called microcephaly in which babies are born with abnormally small heads and brains that have not developed properly.
The World Health Organization (WHO) claimed that Zika is spreading wildly.
Although the Zika Virus is so abundant, some countries are in more danger than others.
“We will have data coming through this year”, Parks said.
Inovio shares are trading up 7.96% at $6.24 in pre-market trade.
“Zika virus was this obscure disease in parts of Africa and South Pacific, and it wasn’t a priority on anyone’s radar screen”, Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said reported by Huffington Post.
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“When the real thing comes in, then the antibodies are there, the immune system is primed, it’s ready to attack right away”, Kobinger said.
