Interested in more global health innovation news? Every week GHTC scours media reports worldwide to deliver essential global health R&D news and content to your inbox. Sign up now to receive our weekly R&D News Roundup email.
Last week, the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) scientific advisers recommended that the next round of COVID-19 vaccines include only the newest variants that have become dominant worldwide, the XBB strains of Omicron, echoing recommendations from the World Health Organization’s vaccine advisers and European regulators. After the FDA makes the final decision, vaccine developers say updated shots could be available within months. The recommendation is based on the idea that the XBB variants are different enough from each other to push the immune system to make more diverse, cross-protective antibodies as opposed to keeping the original strain in the shot, which can cause people’s immune systems to respond more strongly to that strain because of previous, repeated exposure rather than the new strains included in the dose.
Researchers at the University of California San Francisco and the National Institute of Biological Standards and Control in the United Kingdom have developed two novel oral polio vaccines, the first new vaccines for polio in 50 years. The vaccines are made from weakened poliovirus that has been genetically engineered to reduce the development of mutations to the active form of the virus, which have been a major challenge of oral polio vaccines, leading to outbreaks of vaccine-derived polio even in countries where the disease was previously believed to have been eliminated. To address those outbreaks as well as uneven vaccination rates worldwide that have led to the continued circulation of the virus, the new vaccines can hopefully be part of the World Health Organization’s most recent push to eradicate polio globally.
A phase 3 trial recently published in The Lancet found that Valneva’s FLA1553 vaccine candidate for chikungunya disease was generally well-tolerated and produced an immune response in 99 percent of study participants in chikungunya-endemic regions. There are currently no approved vaccines or effective antiviral treatments for the disease caused by chikungunya infection. The vaccine developers hope that this candidate could become the first vaccine available for people living in as well as travelers to chikungunya-endemic regions or regions at risk of an outbreak. The vaccine could become even more important as climate change is expected to drive the global spread of mosquitoes—and therefore mosquito-borne viruses like chikungunya—to new areas.