Hyderabad’s AIIMS Bibinagar leads final trials for India’s first indigenous dengue vaccine

Hyderabad’s AIIMS Bibinagar has emerged as a crucial site for India’s first indigenous dengue vaccine, currently in phase III clinical trials. Led by ICMR and developed in partnership with Panacea Biotec, the single-shot tetravalent vaccine is in its final phase of enrollment.

Hyderabad: Hyderabad has emerged as a critical battleground for the development of the country’s first indigenous dengue vaccine. The All Indian Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Bibinagar has now become a key centre for the phase III dengue vaccine trial, as the vaccine development program enters its final phase of enrollment.

The nationwide phase III clinical trials of dengue vaccine have reached a critical stage, with more than 70 percent of the targeted 10,000 participants now enrolled. With AIIMS Bibinagar as one of the trial centres, the final recruitment phase is underway, with enrollment expected to conclude by this October.

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In all, there are 20 trial sites across the country and Hyderabad’s AIIMS Bibinagar is one of the key centres contributing to the final push towards a single-shot dengue vaccine. The entire study for the AIIMS, Bibinagar is being spearheaded by Dr Rashmi Kundapur, who is the principal investigator and Additional Professor with the Department of Community Medicine, AIIMS, Bibinagar.

Dubbed as ‘DengiAll’, the dengue vaccine development is being led by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), which has identified 20 sites for the phase-III clinical trials. Since every year, the country witnesses all four serotypes of the dengue virus (DENV-1, DENV-2, DENV-3 and DENV-4), which are known to circulate across India, the clinical trial of aiming to test a tetravalent vaccine against all the serotypes.

Based on estimates, for conducting the countrywide phase-III clinical trials of dengue vaccine, the ICMR will be incurring an expenditure of anywhere between Rs 26 crore to Rs 30 crore. While the dengue vaccine is being developed and trialed by ICMR and Panacea Biotec, the initial vaccine strain came from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States.