Dengue Vaccine Of Thailand May Be Helpful

We work on a dengue vaccine for most of 60 years and for the first time in 60 years, we have a potential candidate that actually shows great promise, said Duane Gubler, director of the School of emerging infectious disease with Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore.

Dengue is a mosquito-borne virus - in fact four different viruses - which affects about 220 million people each year, two million development of dengue hemorrhagic fever can be fatal. The virus is endemic in Southeast Asia, but with urbanization and globalization, it spread rapidly throughout the tropical world, with the number of cases rose tenfold between 1970 and today, Dr. Gubler said.

Thai scientists have conducted research on a vaccine against dengue in the past 20 years, and now, with support from Sanofi Pasteur, seems on the verge of a breakthrough. Since 2009, scientists at Mahidol University in Thailand were 4,000 children Ratchburi dose province, which has the highest incidence of dengue across the country with a vaccine jointly developed by Mahidol and Sanofi Pasteur.

So far, the vaccine appears to be very safe, with few clinical reactions after each vaccination, said Arunee Sabcharoen, senior researcher at the Faculty of Clinical Tropical Medicine Mahidol. Despite uncertainty about the outcome of the trial, Sanofi Pasteur has already begun construction of a facility for 300 million vaccine against dengue fever in Neuville-sur-Saone, France.

We decided in 2009 to begin construction of a building to supply the world with 100 million doses, said John Lang, chief of the immunization program against dengue Sanofi Pasteur. We hope the vaccine will be available in 2014. Scientists have found many obstacles to finding a vaccine against dengue, including the fact that it could not be tested on animals (the virus only infects humans), and because there are four strains, each of which requires formation of a different immunity.

Moreover, since the virus tends to prevail in the poor Third World countries and the giant pharmaceutical companies are generally not interested in investing in research and development of a vaccine.

Dr. Gubler has given the apparent success of the connection to the vaccine trials in Thailand to research funds and a breakthrough. The breakthrough that allows the current procedure for the vaccine was the ability to construct infectious clones of the virus, and genetically engineered a vaccine that protects against the four viruses.