Advancements in developing an effective and preventive dengue vaccine

Every year millions of people in various tropical and subtropical regions encounter infection with dengue virus. Within the last few decades, its prevalence has increased up to 30-fold globally and presently these viruses have been transmitted in more than 100 countries. Scientists contributed to the development of tetravalent dengue vaccine by adopting numerous approaches including live vaccine, recombinant protein vaccine, DNA vaccine and virus-vectored vaccines. A vaccine should be genetically stable, equally effective against all serotypes, must be in-expensive and commercially available. Chimeric yellow fever virus-tetravalent dengue vaccine (CYD-TDV) is the first licensed vaccine developed by Sanofi Pasteur in December 2015, but this vaccine is not fully effective against different dengue virus serotypes (Sanofi Pasteur, Lyon, France). This review explores the advancements and challenges involved in the development of dengue vaccine.