Dengue vaccine closer to reality?

WASHINGTON: Researchers have inched closer to developing a novel therapy using mutated antibodies to protect people from the dengue virus. Scientists, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research, said that nearly half of the world's population is at risk of infection by the dengue virus , yet there is no specific treatment for the disease.

Despite the threat posed by the disease, developing a vaccine against dengue has so far proved challenging, because dengue is not one virus but four different viruses, or serotypes, each of which must be neutralized by the vaccine. Protecting people from only one or some of the four viruses could cause them to develop the more severe form of dengue if they later become infected with one of the other serotypes, according to Ram Sasisekharan , professor of biological engineering at MIT.

"That was the motivation for carrying out our study, to generate a fully neutralizing antibody that works for all four serotypes," he said in a statement. Efforts to develop a therapeutic antibody for dengue are focused on a part of the virus called the envelope protein. This is a very critical protein that allows the virus to latch on to the appropriate receptor within the host, to infect them, replicate and spread," Sasisekharan said.