One of the vaccines is expected to enter preliminary human studies this year.
Advertisement
A Zika vaccine developed by the National Institute of Health is about to start clinical trials in humans, and the University of Maryland School of Medicine is one of just three sites in the United States tapped to evaluate the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness.
The other two vaccines – a DNA vaccine and a so-called adenovirus vector-based vaccine – exposed monkeys to fragments of DNA that the Zika virus uses to make its outer coat. “That increases the chance that we will have at least one, if not more than one, that works in the end”. Even through the researchers are about to get human trials underway, a market-ready version of any of the three vaccines could still be up to a few years from deployment.
Both the NIH and Inovio vaccines are DNA vaccines, which unlike traditional vaccines that use deactivated or weakend viruses, or proteins from the virus created to prompt an immune response, use genetic material derived from the viruses’ key proteins to stimulate the immune system. All three were compared with a placebo vaccine injected into the bodies of “control” monkeys. The control subjects showed viremia at day 3 post-infection, while the vaccinated monkeys showed total protection against Zika virus.
Because of the seriousness of the Zika epidemic that’s now gripping Latin America, Army and Harvard researchers are working at a rapid pace to produce a vaccine.
The vaccine developed fully protected infected monkeys from individual strains of Brazilian and Puerto Rican Zika virus and had no adverse side-effects. Partisan bickering and related efforts to win points on other issues are a distraction. There is no vaccine for the virus yet, however, considering its rapid spread, researchers all over the world are trying to formulate a successful and safe vaccine as soon as possible.
The vaccine - spearheaded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases - is genetically engineered with DNA from Zika itself.
Fauci said that “the target of the vaccine will be women of childbearing age and their sexual partners”.
“This gives us substantial optimism moving into human trials”, said Barouch, who directs the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
The volunteers will also undergo follow-up visits to have their blood samples taken for laboratory testing to measure their immune response to the vaccine. Fauci said in a statement that is imperative to prevent Zika virus infection and the devastating birth defects that it causes in newborns.
Advertisement
And what would his team say to the people of Miami, who’ve been warned by the CDC of high Zika risk in a “hot zone” there?
