Faster Vaccine Methods Could Limit Future Health Outbreaks

Novel vaccine technologies could limit future outbreaks, as they did with Zika, by drastically shortening the time it takes to create a useful vaccine, according to the NIH’s vaccine leaders.

The time to initial human testing dropped to slightly longer than three months from about 20 months for work on emerging threats like the 2003 SARS outbreak, the avian flu in 2005, the pandemic flu in 2009, and the Zika virus outbreak in 2016, scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) wrote in a recent article. These vaccines were developed using DNA-based platforms known as ...