Dengue vaccine closer to reality, say scientists

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 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. Threat Despite the threat the disease posed, developing a vaccine has so far proved challenging, because dengue is not one virus but four different viruses, or serotypes, each of which must be neutralised 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 neutralising antibody that works for all four...