Super-engineered vaccine against polio offers rarest hope

Scientists have developed super-engineered vaccines that can totally knock out polio.

The new oral vaccine is engineered to combat the resurgence of the highly mutated polio strains which have continued to frustrate global effort to eliminate polio.

Polio or poliomyelitis is a viral disease that can affect children under the age of 5. Although 70% of all polio cases may be asymptomatic, severe cases with symptoms such as meningitis, muscle paralysis could lead to serious deformity and even death. The highly contagious disease has no cure.

Polio is now endemic in Afghanistan and Pakistan where pockets of aggressive cases have been reported. In several other countries polio is still a major concern that could thwart years of global effort.

Polio cases related to vaccines is now a major global concern as virus shedding from feaces of immunized children could constitute a major risk for the unvaccinated.

Sabin vaccine {also known as oral poliovirus virus (OPV)}, a live attenuated oral polio vaccine has until now played key role in controlling poliomyelitis. In the article published in Nature, scientists have now developed two additional live attenuated vaccine candidates against type 1 and 3 polio viruses. The candidates which according to the scientists were developed by replacing the capsid coding region of new type 2 oral polio vaccine (nOPV2) with that from Sabin 1 or 3.

The first human trial of the super polio vaccines have already been carried out and data is now being analyzed. Preliminary report suggest a very impressive outcome.

It is believed that the new vaccine will be more stable and could offer the rarest hope for a world free of polio.