World’s first anti-dengue vaccine out next year

MANILA, Philippines - The world’s first anti-dengue vaccine will be out by July 2015, Health Secretary Enrique Ona said yesterday.

Speaking to reporters, Ona said the vaccine will be included in the Department of Health (DOH)’s Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI), but with limited coverage initially.

“We will be targeting particular areas and age groups – the most affected ones – to be covered by this initially,” he said. “The company had already made an announcement that the vaccine will be available but it did not give any estimate about the costing.”

Ona was referring to Sanofi Pasteur, a France-based pharmaceutical company that had initiated clinical trials in some countries in Asia, including the Philippines, and Latin America.

Asian efficacy trial had yielded a “promising overall efficacy of 56.6 percent,” indicating that “more than half of the subjects did not get dengue compared to the group that did not receive the vaccine in a study,” he added.

The Asian trial involved a total of 10,275 children in the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia.

The Philippine study covered 3,500 children in Cebu and San Pablo, Laguna. It is being done by the DOH-run Research Institute for Tropical Medicine led by principal investigator Rosario Capeding, head of RITM’s Department of Microbiology.

The study in Latin America involved more than 20,000 children in Brazil, Colombia, Honduras, Mexico and Puerto Rico. It showed that after three doses, the vaccine reduced the possibility of developing dengue hemorrhagic fever by 88.5 percent, meeting the criteria of the World Health Organization (WHO), Ona said.

It also observed a 67 percent reduction in the risk of hospitalization due to dengue.

The measured efficacy of the dengue vaccine during the 25-month observation is consistent across countries and appears to vary by dengue serotypes between 34.7 percent and 72.4 percent.