World’s First Chikungunya Vaccine Developed
Researchers from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have recently developed the first vaccine for Chikungunya that is safe for use on people, as well as effective. The vaccine was created from an insect-specific virus, meaning it is the chikungunya virus that infects insects only and not the form that infects humans. This completely removes any danger of people accidentally catching the virus through the vaccine. While it hasn’t yet been tested on people, the vaccine produced a strong immune defense very quickly and was completely successful at protecting mice and nonhuman primates from catching the virus.
Chikungunya is one of many mosquito-borne viruses, with symptoms including fever, severe joint paint, headache, muscle pain, swelling of the joints, and a rash. Patients will sometimes feel better within as little as a week, but many people develop other long-term health issues such as joint pain that last for years.
What makes this new vaccine so impressive, and could possibly revolutionize the way we create vaccines in the future, is that is it not made from the actual virus the way most vaccines are. With traditional vaccines researchers have to often balance safety and effectiveness by choosing whether to create a vaccine out of a weakened form of the live pathogen, which is more effective, but less safe, or create the vaccine out of an inactivated pathogen, which is more safe, but not nearly as effective in its protection, usually then requiring several doses of the vaccine.
For this new vaccine, researchers used Eilat virus, the form of chikungunya that only infects insects, as the platform for the vaccine. The researchers from UTMB used the Eilat virus to develop a “hybrid virus-based vaccine containing chikungunya structural proteins.” This allowed them to design a strong vaccine that elicited a quick and strong immune response, without leaving any evidence of the virus in test primate’s blood or symptoms of the disease. This is huge people!
How do you think this new method of developing vaccines with these clone viruses will change how we develop vaccines in the future? Could this speed up the development of vaccines in general?