An experimental vaccine for dengue fever protected every single study participant against the virus, NIH researchers found.
Advertisement
It worked just as the researchers hoped. “Anna Durbin, an infectious-disease specialist at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, was the principal investigator of the study”.
In a small study, participants who received the TV003 vaccine developed no symptoms of dengue fever.
Dengue is the most prevalent mosquito-borne virus in the world, which infects almost 400 million people across more than 120 countries each year.
Researchers believe the vaccine’s effects will be long-lasting, though they only tested it after six months. Protecting against it, however, has been a challenge, particularly because an effective vaccine needs to prevent all four serotypes. When they’ve developed one, they held a different testing method to ensure maximum efficiency. It is one of several candidate vaccines now in clinical trials.
The new vaccine could prove more effective, but there’s still a way to go.
“To see that we got 100 percent protection against infection gives us great confidence in moving forward that the vaccine is going to work”. Currently, only one vaccine has been approved, but now a new, attenuated vaccine is performing well in randomized, double-blind trials, according to a study published today (March 16) in Science Translational Medicine. Making a shot to tackle the outbreak isn’t too hard in theory, but producing a safe, effective and deliverable product to protect pregnant women and girls is not easy in practice, experts say.
“It has to be used extremely carefully”, she said.
Beth Kirkpatrick, the coauthor of the study and head of the vaccine testing center at the University of Vermont, said that the vaccine appears to be “100 percent efficacious” in preventing infection by dengue strain No. 2, in addition to the other three strains.
“The dengue vaccine will now proceed to the ultimate test of effectiveness: large field-based trials in dengue-endemic countries”, Kristen Pierce, associate professor of medicine at UVM, noted. Efforts to fight Zika could also help the fight against dengue. It has been linked to brain defects in newborns, and also to the paralytic disease Guillain-Barre syndrome. It’s a very close relative of Zika. That kills more than 25,000 people each year. In a recent update, World Health Organization said 18 companies and research institutions are working on Zika vaccines in response to the virus’ frantic spread throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. It may be the best way “to know if you have a stinker before you try to test it in thousands or tens of thousands of people”. Although that research will still need to be done, “we really wanted to have an early clue that the (vaccine) would work”, Whitehead said. They can go to work.
A vaccine has been a challenge to develop because of the unique structure of the pathogen.
“The U.S. government has made the vaccine materials and technology available for licensure across the world”, Whitehead said. There’s the Butantan Institute in Brazil and they have an exclusive license for the product in Brazil.
Advertisement
The difference comes down to how the two vaccines are designed.
