A team of scientists at the University of Vermont (UVM) Vaccine Testing Center has been working to develop an efficient, single-dose vaccine designed to protect people from the four strains of dengue fever, and the team said this week that clinical trials on a test vaccine have been promising so far.
The center has been working with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of public Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a branch of the national Institutes of Health, since 2008.
The study is published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
“This work used a robust method which predicts a high likelihood of success for this critically important dengue vaccine,” Dr. Beth Kirkpatrick, a UVM professor of medicine, director of the Vaccine Testing Center and first author on the study, said. “I thank all members of the UVM, Johns Hopkins and NIH dengue teams who have worked extremely hard over many years to develop this vaccine.”
All of the study volunteers showed positive toleration of the vaccine. Everyone who received the vaccine was protected from the virus, while none of the volunteers with the placebo was protected.
“The NIH dengue vaccine will now proceed to the ultimate test of effectiveness: large field-based trials in dengue-endemic countries,” Dr. Kristen Pierce, associate professor of medicine and UVM clinical investigator, said. “Beginning later this month, our team will be testing this vaccine in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and a large phase III efficacy trial has already begun in Brazil.”
