The first dengue vaccine candidate (CYD-TDV) has shown moderate protection (56 percent) against the disease in Asian children in phase 3 clinical testing, according to a new research.

The vaccine also showed 88.5 percent efficacy after 3 doses against severe disease (dengue haemorrhagic fever) which leads to hospitalisation for over half a million people (mostly children) every year, and 67 percent against dengue-associated hospitalisation.

Dr Maria Rosario Capeding, lead author from the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine in the Philippines, said that their results suggest that vaccination with CYD-TDV could reduce the incidence of symptomatic dengue infection by more than half and importantly reduced severe disease and hospitalisations. This candidate vaccine had the potential to have a significant impact on public health in view of the high disease burden in endemic countries.

Professor Annelies Wilder-Smith from Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore said that perhaps the most interesting finding of this trial was that efficacy after at least one dose was almost as high as that after three dose because three doses 6 months apart was an inconvenient and costly immunisation schedule for scale up in national programmes, the question of whether sufficient efficacy could be achieved with a lower number of doses deserves further assessment.

Smith added that for the moment, the CYD-TDV vaccine was the best they had, however, with 56percent efficacy it would never be a single solution.

The study is published in The Lancet.