Dengue Fever  There are approximately 50 million cases per year of this mosquito-borne virus, making it the most frequent serious viral infection in the world.  An average of 500,000 persons, mostly children, are hospitalized with dengue hemorrhagic fever annually and 24,000 of these persons, again mostly children, will not survive dengue infection.  The disease is now endemic in more than 100 countries in Africa, the Americas, the Eastern Mediterranean, Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific, with the latter two regions being the most seriously affected.  A more severe form of dengue fever called dengue hemorrhagic fever is responsible for most fatalities.  This more severe disease is due to an individual having antibodies to one of the four serotypes of dengue and then becoming infected by another serotype


An effective dengue vaccine will be able to stimulate complete protection against all four serotypes of dengue simultaneously. It will do so in infants who have circulating antibodies to dengue virus that they received transplacentally and from their mothers’ milk.  This is a high bar for a vaccine to clear but one that we think will be possible using new Global Vaccines technologies.  These new technologies will not only create more effective and safer vaccines against dengue, but will enable these vaccines to be produced at a significantly lower cost.

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