French health care giant Sanofi Pasteur will soon test a vaccine against dengue fever in India amid concerns about the increasingly global spread of the disease, reports said on November 19. The vaccine will be tried on about 120 adults followed by trials on children before it can be made available internationally as soon as 2015, the Times of India newspaper said.
"Sites for the vaccine's final trials will stretch from Thailand to India as this vaccine has to work on populations across countries. We will test it in India soon," Sanofi's CEO Christopher Viehbacher was quoted as saying. Dengue causes a flu-like illness for most victims but one of its strains can cause life-threatening internal bleeding.
There is no licensed vaccine to protect against dengue. Efforts to develop one have been complicated by the fact that there are four different strains, all of which may circulate in an outbreak zone. Dengue also seems to be exclusive to humans, which means it is impossible to test vaccines on lab animals first. Jean Lang, head of the vaccine's research and development programme, said Sanofi had been asked to conduct "phase two safety trials" in India by the national drug controller.
Comments
Comments are closed.