Swetha Raghavan from the Dengue Vaccine Programme at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), said: “Our attempt is a first mRNA dengue vaccine for India as an alternative to traditional approaches. One can choose specific antigenic regions to overcome the challenges of Antibody-Dependent Enhancement, confer protection across multiple serotypes, incorporate multiple strain information in the vaccine design, and do away with using whole viruses.” She adds, “so far there are three vaccine candidates, Dengvaxia from Sanofi (not approved in India), QDENGA (Tak 003) from Takeda for use in the European Union and one taken up by ILL, Panacea and Serum Institute and all are live attenuated vaccines.” The National Institute of Virology in Pune and IISc in Bengaluru have been approached for trials on monkeys as trials outside India would be expensive. They want the vaccine to be an Indian vaccine with studies in India and industrial support. Swetha says: “We have tried it on mice and it’s working well. Monkey trials will be followed by Phase I human trials.”
Read more here: Source link