Sanofi Pasteur to Expand Clinical Trials for Dengue Vaccine

Sanofi Pasteur to Expand Clinical Trials for Dengue Vaccine

The vaccine developer Sanofi Pasteur, a division of Sanofi-Aventis SA, on Tuesday announced that it is expanding Asian clinical trials of a vaccine for dengue, Bloomberg reports (Gale, Bloomberg, 4/21). The company expects the trials currently in progress will provide the clinical data needed to move a dengue vaccine to market by 2015, making it the first vaccine to protect against the disease (Wong-Anan, Reuters, 4/21).

After starting clinical trials of the vaccine in children in Thailand in February, the company will widen the trial of the dengue shot to include more than 1,200 children and adults in Singapore and 180 people in Vietnam (Bloomberg, 4/21). The Strait Times reports that the study will "compare the safety of the dengue vaccine and the measure of immune response to it and compare it to the other vaccines - hepatitis A and flu vaccines" (The Strait Times, 4/21).

Sanofi Pasteur's head of the Clinical Dengue Program Melanie Saville said: "Our priority is to license the vaccine in endemic countries, so we are looking at licensing the vaccine in countries in Asia and Latin America" (Reuters, 4/21). Saville also said that making the vaccine available to endemic countries at affordable prices is a priority for the company (Channelnewsasia.com, 4/21).

In a Sanofi Pasteur press release, Chusak Prasittisuk, coordinator of Communicable Diseases Control at the World Health Organization South East-Asia region said: "Dengue has emerged as a serious public health problem in Asia-Pacific in the last decades. There are 1.8 billion people in the region at risk of dengue fever" (Yahoo/PR Newswire, 4/21).

In total, about 2.5 billion people worldwide at risk of the mosquito transported dengue disease – making it "the most widespread tropical disease after malaria," Reuters writes. Annually, 230 million people are infected with dengue.

An official at the World Health Organization in March said that dengue outbreaks in Asia-Pacific were up this year, "killing three times more people in recent years," Reuters reports.  "There is a clear unmet medical need there is no vaccine available. Vaccination is one of the main and most successful way of preventing diseases such as dengue," Saville said (Reuters, 4/21).