The partnership will open the door for a broader collaboration with the US government, Sanofi said.
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French pharmaceuticals firm Sanofi today revealed it has teamed up with the United States military to accelerate development of a vaccine for the Zika virus which has swept through South and Central America.
The World Health Organization has said that based on observational, cohort and case-control studies there is strong scientific consensus that Zika is a cause of the birth defect microcephaly as well as Guillain-Barre syndrome, a neurological disorder.
The trial will be funded by the USA government, according to Col. Nelson Michael and Col. Stephen Thomas, the leads on the Zika program. NIAID will sponsor a series of phase 1 ZPIV trials while the technology transfer process is occurring. David Weiner, the Wistar Institute Executive Vice President said when they started to see a reaction, “our reaction was okay, we got it to work once let’s get it to work twice”. This suggests that an effective vaccine against Zika is feasible.
Researchers say they are getting close to a vaccine in the fight against Zika.
A single dose of the WRAIR’s experimental vaccine was shown to give 100 percent protection in mice against the Zika virus, according to a study published in Nature last week, boosting hopes that it will also work in humans.
Through the partnership, WRAIR will transfer its Zika vaccine technology-dubbed Zika purified inactivated virus (ZPIV)-to Sanofi while the French pharma preps for Phase II testing and formulates an overall development strategy.
The announcement reveals Sanofi’s ambition to develop the first Zika vaccine, both for the immediate global health emergency and as part of its long-term vaccine portfolio. In order to develop vaccines to treat the virus, companies, including Sanofi is in the race.
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“In addition to exploring our own vaccine technology used in our new dengue fever vaccine, we are looking at other pathways to get a Zika vaccine into the clinic as soon as possible”. In Brazil, about 1.5 million people have been infected with Zika in an outbreak starting a year ago, and more than 1,600 babies have been born with abnormally small heads and brains.
