India's First Prospective DNA Vaccine Against Dengue

India’s first prospective DNA vaccine against dengue shows promising results on mice

- Rohini Krishnamurthy

INA significant development in DNA vaccination research, India's first and only DNA vaccine candidate for dengue has shown promising results. In preliminary trials on mice, the candidate generated a robust immune response and improved survival rates after exposure to the disease.

The DNA vaccine candidate has been in development since 2019 by scientists from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru, in collaboration with nine institutions in India, Africa and the US. The team at NCBS is led by Sudhir Krishna, a professor specialising in biochemistry. While his laboratory primarily works on human cervical cancer research, the team became interested in dengue vaccination in 2011 after collaborating with St John's Medical College, Bengaluru, to sequence samples collected from dengue patients. "We need a dengue vaccine because it is a major public health burden in India," says Arun Sankara-doss, research lead of the dengue vaccine programme at NCBS. In 2021, India reported 110,473 dengue cases, ranking fourth among the worst-affected nations.

The team chose DNA technology since it is considered stable, cost-effective and safer than whole-virus vaccines. "Traditional vaccines essentially contain the whole virus. But we speculate some regions in the virus could be responsible for adverse effects," says Swetha Raghavan, a postdoctoral researcher at NCBS. A DNA platform, she explains, allows researchers to pick certain regions that can provoke an effective response and eliminate those likely to cause harm. Further, this vaccine can be modified to target other viruses.