Cuba advances towards anti-dengue vaccine

Cuban health authorities plan to launch clinical trials of an anti-dengue vaccine later this year, experts said Wednesday. The vaccine is currently being tested on monkeys and will advance to clinical trials (on humans) if the results are "satisfactory," said Dr. Gerardo Guillen, Research Director of the UN-backed International Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB). "Research has shown its effectiveness in controlling the multiplication of the virus in these animals," said Dr. Guillen, at the 2012 International Biotech Congress taking place in Havana He added those results in turn pointed to the "possibility of protecting against the disease." Highlighting the difficulty of battling the disease, also known as hemorrhagic fever, Guillen said that there are four different types of the virus, so the vaccine must be able to combat each of them. What's more, obtaining a definitive vaccine can take years because of the time required in perfecting the compound to be administered in humans, the construction of production plants, and the length of clinical trials in the different regions plagued by dengue, he said. While dengue, which can be lethal if not treated in time, is not endemic in Cuba, it is considered a serious scourge in Latin America, where more than a million people were infected in 2010 alone. Tackling dengue was one of the first tasks of Cuba's biotech revolution, initiated by former President Fidel Castro some 30 years ago, after a serious outbreak in 1981 that killed 256 people, including 181 children. Cuba has since maintained a continual campaign to control dengue's carrier mosquito. According to the World Health Organization, almost half of the world's population could be at risk of being exposed to the disease due to its accelerated spread. To date, nothing exists to prevent dengue, however several pharmaceutical corporations make vaccines that use the virus itself to combat the disease, limiting their application to newborns. Experts from Cuba's Pedro Kuri Institute of Tropical Medicine (IPK) as well as the Pasteur Institute in France are also taking part in the studies.