Despite its subsiding number of cases, Nipah Virus (NiV) is once again the talk of the town. In light of the outbreaks of NiV in the last five years in Kerala, The Indian Council Of Medical Research(ICMR), shared that they are in talks with the Serum Institute of India(SII) and the Central Government for locally manufacturing vaccines for NiV.
Currently, scientists across the world are still trying to understand how exactly NiV transfers from fruit bats to humans, and actively searching for scientific preventive measures. The Centre For Disease Control And Prevention informed that the Nipah virus spreads through close contact with the saliva or urine of infected fruit bats. However, once this virus has infected people, person-to-person spread of NiV can also occur. Considering this fact, a locally manufactured vaccine will bring necessary relief to the Indian masses, especially those residing in Kerala.
Challenges In Developing Nipah Virus Vaccines In India
Dr Rajiv Bahl, Director General, ICMR, shared that the public health watchdog of India, ICMR, is considering developing the NiV vaccine as part of a larger scheme to develop a range of essential vaccines right here in India.
The director general said that making the NiV vaccine won’t be easy. He shared that currently there are a number of challenges on the route to commercially available NiV vaccines:
- Making the NiV vaccine would require looking for the right partners who can successfully develop the vaccine. The challenge here is which of the diverse platforms, such as DNA vaccine, mRNA vaccine, adenoviral vector vaccine, protein subunit vaccine, and nasal vaccine, is the correct one for a vaccine against NiV.
- It would be tougher to sell Nipah vaccines, as the required doses would be much fewer compared to a widespread disease like dengue. NiV has so far infected only a handful of people in certain districts of Kerala over the last five years. So developing NiV vaccines does not seem commercially viable.
Expressing these concerts, Dr Bahl stated that currently the NiV vaccine will be manufactured purely in national interest, and he can not divulge on this topic any further since everything is still in its planning stage and no concrete steps have been taken so far.
Meanwhile, the ICMR’s National Institute of Virology in Pune is conducting lab tests to understand which variant of Nipah is circulating in Kerala to understand the biological makeup of this virus. The medical body has also requested 20 additional doses of monoclonal antibodies from Australia to treat the NiV infection.
US Conducting Clinical Trials For Nipah Virus Vaccine
Despite the challenges laid out by Dr Bahl, the possibility of a viable vaccine against NiV is not so bleak. Last year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States announced that they had launched an early-stage clinical trial of mRNA vaccine against NiV. The vaccine was developed in collaboration with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’s (NIAID) Vaccine Research Centre and will be manufactured by Moderna, informed NIH.
The MRNA platform was in wide use while producing the COVID-19 vaccines. One reason for this advancement in NiV vaccine development is that NIH posed a rock-solid case against the deadly infection. Releasing a statement, Anthony S Fauci, Director, NIAID said, “Nipah virus poses a considerable pandemic threat because it mutates relatively easily, causes disease in a wide range of mammals, can transmit from person-to-person, and kills a large percentage of the people it infects. The need for a preventive Nipah virus vaccine is significant.”
This holds true as Dr Bahl had also shared that the mortality rate of NiV is estimated to be between a chocking 40% to 75%, while the mortality rate of COVID-19 is around 2 to 3%.
However, since the NiV vaccine is still on the horizon, and will take some time to reach the common masses, Dr Bahl advised that taking precautions on an individual level is the best option. He underscored that the way to avoid Nipah is the same as COVID. He advised people to keep practising social distancing when out in public spaces, to make masks an essential part of our daily lives, and to maintain impeccable personal hygiene. He further recommended the importance of washing fruits thoroughly and staying away from bat colonies, or raw foods that might have been exposed to fruit bats.
