The International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) has said its dengue research team has developed a vaccine candidate that offers protection against all the four types of viruses that causes the mosquito-borne fever without increasing risk of a lethal secondary infection.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe believe that this ICGEB designed vaccine is a game-changer,\u201d Navin Khanna, who leads the dengue vaccine research at ICGEB, said on Monday.<\/p>\n
\u201cA designed virus-like particle is much better than using the conventional dengue vaccines because they have the burden of antibody-dependent enhancement,\u201d Khanna added.<\/p>\n
The results, that were reported at the International Vaccine Conference organised by the international nonprofit research organisation in Delhi, are based on studies in mice and macaques.<\/p>\n
Research for a vaccine against dengue has been going on for several decades but one that is fully effective against all the four serotypes or strains of the disease \u2013 DENV-1, DENV-2, DENV-3 and DENV-4 \u2013 does not exist.<\/p>\n
Vaccines work by triggering an immune response. In the case of dengue, some of the antibodies produced by the body of the person affected for the first time can lead to a more severe infection the next time they are exposed to a different strain of the virus.<\/p>\n
Developing a dengue vaccine is a complicated as it is a single strand RNA virus that breeds inside the human body with a chance of contracting a more deadly dengue infection the second time.<\/p>\n
The ICGEB candidate does not result in the production of the antibodies that would lead to disease enhancement.<\/p>\n
Currently, the only dengue vaccine recommended by the World Health Organization is Dengvaxia, developed by Sanofi Pasteur.<\/p>\n
The pooled phase III clinical efficacy results among at-risk populations of over 9 years old, over a 25-month period, showed that the vaccine prevented nine out of 10 severe dengue cases, eight out of 10 hospitalisations, and two out of three symptomatic cases caused by any of the four types of the virus.<\/p>\n
According to the WHO, efficacy by serotype demonstrated in phase III showed that the vaccine is more effective against serotypes 3 and 4 (73.6% and 83.2 %, respectively) than for serotypes 1 and 2 (58.4% and 47.1%).<\/p>\n
Several other dengue vaccine candidates are under development with a handful in India as well. Panacea Biotec, an Indian company, is set to begin clinical trials of its vaccine in humans by early 2018.<\/p>\n
The ICGEB research is supported by the Wellcome Trust, India\u2019s department of biotechnology and the Indo-US Vaccine Programme. Results of the latest round of tests are yet to be published.<\/p>\n
The ICGEB team announced a tie-up with Mumbai-based Sun Pharmaceutical Industries for development of the vaccine candidate last year.<\/p>\n
A vaccine for the mosquito-borne disease is critical to driving down the number of deaths caused by the disease and lower out-of-pocket costs of patients.<\/p>\n
India suffers a high burden of this tropical disease and over 140,000 cases and 216 deaths have been reported this year, according to data available till November 19.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) has said its dengue research team has developed a vaccine candidate that offers protection against all the four types of viruses that causes the mosquito-borne fever without increasing risk of a lethal secondary infection. \u201cWe believe that this ICGEB designed vaccine is a game-changer,\u201d Navin Khanna, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11642,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11641"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11643,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11641\/revisions\/11643"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}