Indian scientists break dengue code, develop non-infectious vaccine from yeast

Indian scientists have achieved an important breakthrough in their efforts to develop a vaccine to prevent the deadly dengue. Supported by the Department of Biotechnology under the Ministry of Science & Technology, scientists at International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) in New Delhi have developed a non-infectious dengue vaccine from yeast. Preliminary animal trials of the vaccine have yielded good results. “Search for a dengue vaccine has been going on across the world for past several decades. We, at our centre, started experiments seven years ago. The new technology we have used, i.e. recombinant DNA technology, to develop the dengue vaccine is a breakthrough,” said Dr Navin Khanna, group leader of Recombinant Gene Products Group, ICGEB. The initial trials done on mice gave encouraging results. The research team explored virus-like particles which can provide “robust immunity” against the vector-borne disease that is endemic to more than a hundred countries. “There are...