Duke-National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School is partnering with Inviragen, a vaccine development company, to research emerging infections disease transmission and prevention as well as to perfect a vaccine to combat dengue fever, the school announced Jan. 26.
Inviragen has been working on a vaccine for dengue since its founding in 2005, said Dan Stinchcomb, its CEO and founder.
Dengue fever is spread by a mosquito-borne virus and can cause extreme flu-like illness and possibly result in death. The virus has four serotypes, or variations, with distinct properties, and the partnership is working to create a vaccine that generates an immune response to all four.
Inviragen has already licensed a dengue vaccine developed at the Centers for Disease Control for the DEN-2 virus, by weakening the viral backbone. In Phase 1 clinical trials, the vaccine proved to be safe and generated an antibody response to the virus, according to the company’s website. Certain genes from the DEN-2 virus were then replaced with genes from the other three stereotypes in order to create a vaccine for all forms of the virus.
Inviragen and Duke NUS are planning to conduct clinical trials for the vaccine in Singapore and are also working on a vaccine for chikungunya, another insect-borne illness that is rapidly emerging in parts of Africa and Asia.
“We’re very collaborative, [and] often collaborate with universities, research institutions, clinical investigators and the like,” Stinchcomb said. “Our goal is to bring vaccine ideas from the lab to patients.”
Dengue is estimated to afflict 50 to 100 million people per year. According to the World Health Organization, about two-fifths of the world’s population is at risk for contracting the disease.
“Dengue is now one of the most important tropical diseases,” said Duane Gubler, program director for Emerging Infectious Diseases at Duke NUS. “It has a tremendous social and economic impact.”
Outside of the partnership, Duke University Medical Center is also conducting research to find alternate methods to combat the virus. By silencing genes one at a time, Dr. Mariano Garcia-Blanco, director of the Duke Center for RNA Biology, and his research group have discovered proteins the virus requires to carry out its life cycle, according to research published in Nature.
“We discovered host proteins that the virus requires, that it absolutely needs, and find inhibitors for those host proteins,” Garcia-Blanco said. “We’re pretty far along in this discovery.”
This method of treatment is promising because dengue fever is acute, Garcia-Blanco said. This means infected patients would only have to be treated with inhibitors for a number of weeks, he explained, thus reducing the chance of long-term toxicity. The professor said he hopes to finalize vitro studies in 2011 and conduct animal studies within the next two to three years.
“We’re interested in understanding how the virus works and using this expertise to make antivirals,” Garcia-Blanco said.
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