Friday, November 11, 2016

Substantial Success in Development of Vaccine to Protect Against Zika Virus

Infer something clever about anti-vaxx people won't take it and I'll get right to the text from the article.  (Science Daily:  DNA-based Zika vaccine showed protection from infection, brain damage and death)

As the global spread of the Zika virus continues, efforts are underway to halt the disease's transmission. While no licensed therapies or vaccines to protect against the Zika virus are currently available, new research published in the journal npj Vaccines demonstrates how a synthetic DNA vaccine approach successfully protected against infection, brain damage and death caused by the mosquito-borne Zika virus in vivo.

- Science Daily

The article goes into some depth about how this relates to the body's immune response so read for the detail but I'll drop right to the result.

This Zika vaccine is being developed in collaboration between Inovio, The Wistar Institute, and GeneOne Life Science Inc. and is currently being tested in two human clinical studies. Before the end of 2016, Inovio expects to report phase I data from the first 40-subject study being conducted in Miami, Philadelphia and Quebec City. In August, the companies also initiated a second study in 160 subjects in Puerto Rico. The CDC estimates that Zika will infect more than 25 percent of the Puerto Rican population by the end of the year, creating the potential for this study's placebo-controlled design to provide exploratory signals of vaccine efficacy in 2017.
- Science Daily

How's that for an action plan and you can see they're far beyond the test tube experimentation with it.


Microcephaly is such a horror when it screws a kid for a life which probably won't last that long.  That seems bleeding heart in writing it but the scope of the infection is the motivation.  There's high encouragement in seeing they apparently have an answer to the disease and it's so far along in testing.

- Infer a lengthy article on mosquitoes are the most dangerous terrorists (they are) -


It's a remarkable thing to see the progress against Zika and I don't have the background to know why this research progressed so quickly relative to a vaccine against HIV.  That's for the interested student to pursue as I'm just pleased to see it appears help against Zika comes soon.

Note:  don't take any political content from the comparison as my first assumption is HIV is more complex in its devious ways and that's why it's so difficult.  Unknown.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Funny how fast they find a vaccine when when the virus affects white nation. Maybe it is because they can pay for it or maybe it is coincidence.

Unknown said...

What is this? HIV affects all kinds of white people.

Anonymous said...

And look how hard they are trying.

Unknown said...

Quite hard and it's not so long since the last HIV update in the science reports.