Chikungunya Vaccine Phase 3 Results Revealed

 Valneva SE today announces that the Company’s pivotal Phase 3 data for its single-shot chikungunya vaccine candidate, VLA1553, have been published in The Lancet.

This article says the strong immune response and the generation of seroprotective titres in almost all vaccinated participants suggests that VLA1553 is an excellent candidate for preventing disease caused by the chikungunya virus.

VLA1553 demonstrated a very high seroresponse rate of 98.9% in participants 28 days after receiving the single administration, and 96% of participants maintained seroresponse six months after vaccination.

VLA1553 is currently the only chikungunya vaccine candidate worldwide for which regulatory review processes are underway. It has been designed by deleting a part of the chikungunya virus genome.

Juan Carlos Jaramillo, M.D., Chief Medical Officer of Valneva, commented in a press release on June 13, 2023, “We are pleased that more detailed results on our single-shot chikungunya vaccine candidate are now available to the scientific and broader public health communities.”

Chikungunya is a mosquito-borne viral disease caused by the chikungunya virus (CHIKV), a Togaviridae virus transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes. The infection leads to symptomatic disease in 72-92% of humans after four to seven days following the mosquito bite.

While mortality with CHIKV is low, morbidity is high. Clinical symptoms include acute onset of fever, debilitating joint and muscle pain, headache, nausea, rash, and chronic arthralgia.

The high-risk areas of infection for travelers are places where chikungunya virus-carrying mosquitos are endemic, including the Americas, parts of Africa, and Southeast Asia, and the virus has spread to more than 110 countries.

The Pan American Health Organization recently confirmed chikungunya cases in the Americas region reached over 210,000 in the first months of 2023. And there were about 51 related fatalities, representing a four-fold increase compared to 2022.