Sanofi Pasteur inks R n D agreement with WRAIR for Zika vaccine

JULY, 2016

French drug maker Sanofi said on Wednesday it had struck a research and development agreement with the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) in the United States to develop a Zika vaccine candidate.

Under the agreement, the Institute will transfer its vaccine technology based on a Zika purified inactivated virus to Sanofi. Sanofi views the agreement as "opening the door for a broader collaboration with the USA government". In order to develop vaccines to treat the virus, companies, including Sanofi is in the race.

Preclinical work on the vaccine is being conducted with long-term HIV vaccine collaborators at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School.

The vaccine uses an inactive trace of the virus, and it may be ready for humans to use by October.

In February 2016, the World Health Organization announced a global public health emergency across 20 countries in the Americas due to the rapid spread of the virus. The US government has agreed to fund the trial, said Col. Nelson Michael, also from the institute. However, some experts have suggested that drug makers are hesitant to fully commit to Zika R&D while they wait to see if there's a large enough market for a vaccine to recoup its costs. "Therefore, this exciting collaboration with the WRAIR creates the opportunity to rapidly move forward", said David Loew, Executive Vice President, Head of Sanofi Pasteur. "Zika, Japanese encephalitis, and dengue belong to the same family of viruses (Flavivirus), are transmitted by the same type of mosquito, and share some similarities at the genetic level, and we already licensed vaccines against those flaviviruses".

The Army institute developed vaccine's single dose tested on mice and found that it was effective.

Researchers here did it at lightning speed for vaccine development.

Sanofi will continue to evaluate its own technology, used in its dengue fever vaccine, but that pathway will take longer to get a Zika candidate into human trials, he said.

"We're looking at. collaborating to get into the clinic quicker to provide a vaccine in response to the current emergency", said John Shiver of Sanofi Pasteur.

In Brazil, about 1.5 million people have been infected with Zika in an outbreak starting a year ago, and more than 1,600 babies have been born with abnormally small heads and brains. cbsport.org