India comes up with world’s first Zika vaccine candidate

Within days of the US government and French pharma major Sanofi announcing they had launched an effort to develop a Zika vaccine, Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech said on Wednesday it had two variants ready for pre-clinical studies, one recombinant and the other inactivated.

Within days of the US government and French pharma major Sanofi announcing they had launched an effort to develop a Zika vaccine, Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech said on Wednesday it had two variants ready for pre-clinical studies, one recombinant and the other inactivated.

Three-month-old Daniel, who was born with microcephaly, undergoes physical therapy at the Altino Ventura foundation in Recife, Brazil. (AP)

A recombinant vaccine involves DNA encoding that stimulates an immune response while an inactivated one consists of virus particles grown under controlled conditions and rendered non-infectious.