US Army and France’s Sanofi combine work on Zika vaccine

Their collaboration is being referred as a broader one with the US government. Clinical trials have protected mice against the mosquito-borne disease, which has been linked with the development of microcephaly and neurological disorders in children.

In U.S. territories the number of diagnosed and reported locally acquired cases stands at 2,526, including 279 pregnant women, Frieden said, noting that in Puerto Rico CDC is seeing “a rapid increase in the level of infection such that we think that each day dozens, and potentially as many as 50, more pregnant women [there] are becoming infected with Zika virus”. FDA must have confidence in the vaccine’s safety before it can be produced on a large scale, Thomas said. The latter are responsible for Zika, dengue, and Japanese encephalitis. The technology has also been used to create vaccines for polio, flu and other diseases. “We learn from the experiments, and then we move forward”.

Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are seen in a mosquito cage at a laboratory in Cucuta, Colombia.

Researchers here did it at lightning speed for vaccine development. Sanofi said the WRAIR, a biomedical research facility administered by the U.S. Department of Defense, would transfer virus vaccine technology to Sanofi Pasteur, the company’s vaccines division.

Data, of course, will be shared with regulatory agencies such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

A WRAIR scientist examines vero cells for the Zika virus. Dan Barouch, professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, who led this previous study, said, “The protection was striking”. Results of the test have been published in the journal Nature.

Sanofi is the first major drugmaker working on a Zika vaccine, one of the furthest advanced in development, according to Reuters. “It’s emerging as a DOD issue”, Thomas said, adding that US forces are deployed to areas in Southern Command that are “Zika-endemic”.

“The military has extensive expertise and capabilities to develop countermeasures”.

This past fall, however, they realized there could be a serious need for a Zika vaccine here in America.

David Weiner, executive vice president, runs the vaccine center at the WISTAR Institute and said, “Every little step like that gave encouragement”. I took nine months when Weiner says vaccines can take decades.

In Brazil, about 1.5 million people have been infected with Zika in an outbreak starting previous year, and more than 1,600 babies have been born with abnormally small heads and brains.

In early February, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced an alliance with Brazil’s Butantan Institute, to develop a Zika vaccine.

Headlines surrounding the Olympics in Brazil read like something out of a horror novel. A committee of NIH researchers will monitor US athletes attending to the Olympic and Paralympic games. Researchers are also interested in evaluating asymptomatic infections.