Dengue vaccine development: l. status

Published on May 28, 2015   28 min

Other Talks in the Series: Vaccines

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0:00
This is Scott Halstead, and I'm going to be giving two lectures on current dengue vaccine development. I have been an officer of the Dengue Vaccine Initiative located at the International Vaccine Institute in Seoul, Korea for more than 10 years. The first lecture describes the current status of dengue vaccine development, and the second will describe the uses and deployment of these vaccines.
0:26
So the lecture will cover three topics. One is the scope of the problem of dengue in the world. And do we need a tetravalent dengue vaccine? And then we'll describe each of the current vaccines that are in development, and their development status.
0:45
So scope of the problem.
0:49
As you can see from this recent global map of the Earth, there is a belt in the tropical regions around the entire globe were dengue viruses are transmitted. This amounts to transmission in 128 different countries. And this slide shows the intensity of transmission. The blue dots are actually reports either from individual countries or published in the literature. So those are indications of current activity. But the colors on the chart, intense red meaning endemic transmission to green meaning no transmission give you a quick idea. You can see that most of the temperate countries do not currently have dengue transmission, either in northern or southern hemisphere.
1:35
Now here's the bad news, which is A, there are four different dengue viruses. They've all evolved from a common ancestor to be 30% to 40% genetically different. And although they perhaps all originated in Southeast Asia, they have spread around the world. And now in each of the endemic areas of the world, in the American, African, and Asian tropics, all of the four viruses are in circulation.