Vaccines
Yellow fever vaccine, regained: how a Dutch team used dengue as a proxy to greenlight YF-17D for a post-thymectomy traveller
Erasmus MC has documented the first orthoflaviviral proxy-first case: a 25-year-old Dutch post-thymectomy patient received YF-17D-204 after TAK-003 confirmed immune competence through dengue-specific antibody and T-cell responses. A single-patient observation rather than a guideline change, but a working template travel-medicine clinics can use to clear the thymectomy contraindication for carefully screened patients.
Read →An Oropouche vaccine candidate designed in silico binds TLR-3 as tightly as a small-molecule drug. The next step is in vivo.
A Saudi and Pakistani research team has used immunoinformatics and molecular dynamics to design a multi-epitope precision vaccine candidate against Oropouche virus, targeting the viral glycoprotein and the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase. The candidate binds human TLR-3 with binding scores in the -288 to -306 kcal/mol range in the docking analysis, and shows favourable expression characteristics in the pET28a+ vector. It is the first 2026 in silico OROV vaccine candidate of the cycle, and the next step is in vivo validation.
Read →The Dengue Vaccine Is Finally Here. It Doesn't Cover Everyone.
Takeda's Qdenga (TAK-003) is approved in many countries with 4.5 years of Phase III data showing 84.1% protection against hospitalisation, a genuine scientific milestone. But 61.2% efficacy means roughly 39 of every 100 vaccinated people exposed to dengue still get the disease, and Dengvaxia has left the market. Why the clinical data itself argues for layered protection, vaccine plus physical prevention.
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