Sanofi-Aventis says it’s making progress developing a vaccine for dengue fever, a tropical disease spread by mosquitoes that strikes up to 100 million people each year.
The early results are encouraging. A trial of the French company’s experimental vaccine in 25 healthy adults generated a protective immune response against all four strains of the dengue virus in all of the test subjects, Jean Lang, Sanofi’s director of travel and endemic vaccines, told the Health Blog. He will report more details at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene meeting in Philadelphia tomorrow.
Lang said Sanofi plans to start a larger clinical test of the vaccine early next year. If all goes well, Sanofi hopes to submit the vaccine for regulatory approval in 2012. Sanofi is developing the vaccine with the World Health Organization.
Dengue fever puts half a million people in the hospital every year, killing up to 5% of them by inducing hemorrhage and shock. Despite decades of vaccine research, the only means of prevention today is mosquito control. Developing a vaccine has proved particularly hard, in part because any shot needs to protect people against all four strains of the virus that cause the disease.
Drug companies haven’t traditionally put much money into tropical diseases because they mostly strike poor people who can’t afford to pay for drugs. But Sanofi says it sees a potential market of up to $1 billion a year for a dengue fever vaccine. That’s because the disease is endemic in rapidly developing countries in Asia, and is also creeping north from Latin America into Texas and other parts of the U.S. Sanofi also sees a chance to sell the vaccine to people traveling to the tropics, a spokesman said.
The company is talking to charitable groups including the GAVI Alliance and the Pediatric Dengue Vaccine Initiative about how to provide the vaccine to poor people should the vaccine become available, the spokesman said. GlaxoSmithKline and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research are also working on an experimental dengue vaccine, as are the National Institutes of Health.
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