Dengue Vaccine to be ready in January 2016

by Murry Page
30 Apr 15
mazmessenger.com

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported that the first vaccine against dengue will go on sale in early 2016 and that the vaccine could reduce the mortality rate from the disease by 50 percent in just four years.

Olivier Charmeil, CEO of Sanofi Pasteur, the company producing the vaccine, said “We want to reduce dengue mortality by 50 percent and morbidity by 25 percent by 2020.”

Charmeil told the BBC that according to previous studies in 20,800 volunteers in Latin America, the vaccine would have a preventive rate of 95.5 percent. He said that such effectiveness would help avoid the most severe cases of dengue and reduce the hospitalization rate by 80 percent.
The CEO said, “Until now the only way to combat dengue was to eliminate the insect that transmits it, but as of January 2016 will be another weapon: a vaccine.”

According to data from the World Health Organization, 390 million people are infected with dengue each year, 100 million of them seriously.

(from Diario de Yucatán)

Vaccine for Dengue Fever Possible by Next Year

by Murry Page

4 Nov 14 

mazmessenger.com

 

According to the results of a large clinical trial undertaken by Sanofi Pasteur, the drug’s manufacturer and the trial’s sponsor, the 20,000 people in Latin America, 10,000 of whom lived in México, who received three doses of the vaccine, reduced their overall risk of becoming infected by dengue fever by 60 percent. More significantly, the drug appears to be 95.5 percent protective against the most severe form of the disease, dengue hemorrhagic fever.

“There’s no vaccine for dengue currently, nor is there any specific treatment for managing illness in people who contract symptomatic dengue disease,” says Alain Bernal, a spokesperson for Sanofi Pasteur.

The researchers who conducted the first large clinical trial found that the vaccine was 56.6 percent effective against dengue, whereas results from a second clinical trial found that the vaccine reduced the incidence of dengue by 60.8 percent.

Scott Halstead, scientific adviser to the nonprofit Dengue Vaccine Initiative, told The New York Timesthat the results were “not anywhere close to what we had hoped, something that would reach up into the 90s.” And today, many researchers continue to express a need for a more effective vaccine.

According to Bernal, Sanofi Pasteur plans to file for registration of the vaccine in 2015, in countries where dengue is prevalent. That means that “the world’s first dengue vaccine could be available in the second half of 2015,” he says.

(from Milenio)