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After ten years of research, the French biotechnology company Valneva could soon market its vaccine against Lyme disease. A promising step forward to counter a growing scourge.
For the past few months, the company Valneva, located in Nantes, has been actively working to develop a vaccine against Covid-19. It’s another vaccine that she could put on the market very soon: the one against Lyme disease, on which she has been working for 10 years. The company shared the preliminary results of its clinical trial on July 22, 2020, and the so-called VLA15 may well be the first vaccine against the Borrelia bacteria transmitted by Ixodes ticks.
This is excellent news since in France, 50,000 people are affected each year by this disease vector transmission. Lyme disease causes muscle and neurological disorders in patients, as well as fatigue and joint complications. Until then, doctors could only advise taking antibiotics. However, experience has shown that dormant forms of the disease survive antibiotics.
Marketing within five years
Since the end of April 2020, the company Valneva has partnered with the American giant Pfizer to market its new vaccine, which seems effective and without Side effects. How does VLA15 work? This vaccine attacks the outer surface of protein A on the Borrelia bacteria. So when a tick attaches itself to a vaccinated person, the antibodies will attach themselves to the bacteria and neutralize it in the tick’s intestine.
Wolfgang Bender, medical director of Valneva, expressed his joy: “We are extremely satisfied with these results which confirm our initial hypotheses. Once the additional phase 2 data has been obtained, we will determine, a little later in the year, the final dose and vaccination schedule ”. A launch date is already advanced, it would be for the year 2025!
