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Arturo Reyes-Sandoval: Developing a novel dengue vaccine

Introduction

My name is Arturo Reyes-Sandoval, I work at the Nuffield Department of Medicine, at the Jenner Institute, developing vaccines. I received MRC Confidence in Concept funding to test a dengue vaccine.

What is the dengue virus?

Dengue virus is an infectious agent, transmitted by a mosquito bite. It produces disease in humans that can go from fever to a severe disease than can lead to death.

What had your research in this area achieved?

Initially we started by designing a new vaccine against the most conserved parts of the dengue virus, we built the vaccine, and then we did early testing in pre-clinical models, and we had verified that this vaccine is highly immunogenic, but unfortunately we hadn’t been able to test if the vaccine could protect against dengue virus.

What did MRC Confidence in Concept funding allow you to do?

The MRC Confidence in Concept grant has allowed me to verify if this vaccine can protect against disease, and it also supported establishing interactions with a group in Brazil that will be very important in the future to test other vaccines.

What are your aspirations for the future of your research?

Our early results indicate that this vaccine is highly efficacious to protect against dengue infection. These have been very good results because this will allow us to apply for future grants to test the vaccine in humans. My major goal is to develop an efficacious vaccine to be able to prevent dengue virus in humans, so I’m hoping that I can take this vaccine to licensing in any country that suffers from this disease.