When will the world get Zika virus vaccine?

The Zika virus is spreading in lots of countries, causing thousands of birth defects. When will the world get an effective vaccine against this dangerous virus?

Adelaide researchers believe a vaccine they have developed for the Chikungunya virus could be adapted to help combat the Zika virus. For the past four years, a team from the University of South Australia have been working with biotech company Sementis to develop a vaccine for the mosquito-borne Chikungunya virus.

With pre-clinical studies showing the vaccine to be 100 percent effective, they believe it could – if adapted – prove a game changer in the battle against what could be the next global health epidemic. The researchers hope to extract genes from the Zika virus to create a safer version, which – when inserted in the body – would produce antibodies and create immunity.

Researchers are planning to start pre-clinical lab based experiments immediately, but it could still be years until an approved vaccine is developed and made available to the public.

Sanofi also says it is ready to take a leading role in the hunt for a vaccine to combat Zika virus after it became the first drugmaker to announce a research and development plan to target the disease.

The French company said it had a head-start in R&D because it already has successful vaccines against viruses that are closely related to Zika — the mosquito-borne disease blamed for an epidemic of birth defects in Latin America.

Sanofi is close to launching the world’s first vaccine for dengue fever — part of the same virus family as Zika — and also produces jabs to prevent Yellow Fever and Japanese Encephalitis.

However, most scientists believe that even if the world’s largest drugmakers were to mobilize as fast as they could, and even if the science were straightforward, it’s unlikely a Zika vaccine could be developed quickly enough to address the expanding outbreak of the mosquito-borne virus that may cause birth defects when pregnant women are infected.

“Vaccines as well as antivirals take time to develop, and I would not expect that anything will be available for use in the course of the current issue that’s going around the world,” said Robert Amler, dean and professor of public health at New York Medical College.

Dengue fever has inspired 14,840 academic papers and hepatitis C is the subject of 73,764, yet there have been only 242 papers published about Zika, according to data from the National Center for Biotechnology Information in Bethesda, Maryland. There’s simply a “data vacuum” when it comes to the virus, said Cameron Simmons, professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Melbourne’s Nossal Institute for Global Health.

In the absence of a vaccine, the WHO has said the best way to reduce infections is controlling mosquitoes and covering skin to prevent bites.

Follow NEWS.am Medicine on Facebook and Twitter