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‘Human trial of India’s first dengue vaccine early next year’
10K people at 20 locations across India will be included in the exercise that will check the efficacy of the vax, said Nivedita Gupta, head, epidemiology and communicable diseases, ICMR
India will begin phase three trial for first indigenous dengue vaccine by April 2024 at 20 locations across the country, said Dr Nivedita Gupta, head, epidemiology and communicable diseases at the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR).
“We will have over 10,000 people between 18 and 80 years of age who will be included in the study,” said Dr Gupta, who was in city on Saturday to attend the ‘MICROCON-2023’—the ongoing annual conference of Indian Association of Medical Microbiologists.
The first phase checked safety of the vaccine, while the second checked if the vaccine made antibodies and the third phase will examine whether the vaccine is working against dengue or not.
“That is why phase three includes over 10K people from 20 locations across the country. This study will be for a period of three years,” said Dr Gupta. It was Dr Gupta who took up and successfully conducted the task of scaling up Covid testing process in India.
There are two bidders who are making dengue vaccine in India. The first one is making it for children between 2 and 18 years and they have completed phase one study. The other making it for adults has done two phases of trials. The seroprevalence study for dengue has already been done in the country.
Sharing why the dengue vaccine is needed, Dr Gupta said, “There is no treatment for dengue and the effort to curb its spread does not work much. The mosquito too is developing multiple breeding habitats apart from the known ones.”
“If we talk of global dengue incidence, half of the world is at risk. Among 100 to 400 million infections that occur every year, over 80% remain mild or asymptomatic. Significantly, with the risk of infection in 129 countries, 70% actual burden is in Asia,” she said.
“Once vaccine is made available, it will curb new cases and deaths due to dengue,” said Dr Sheetal Verma, senior faculty at King George’s Medical University and joint organising secretary of the conference.
In the third phase of trials, National AIDS Research Institute (NARI), Pune, will coordinate clinical study sites, National Institute of Epidemiology (NIE), Chennai, will do data management for the trial while the National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune, will provide lab support. In Uttar Pradesh, over 25,000 dengue cases have been reported this year so far. In 2022, 19,821 dengue cases were reported.
