An Indian biotech company claims to have developed a vaccine for the Zika virus, but says it will not be available for a few years without help from the government and the World Health Organisation (WHO).
And a number of drug companies have since announced that they are working on a vaccine for the virus, which has been linked to birth defects.
With international concern growing about the virus, Indian company Bharat Biotech announced it had already patented a possible vaccine.
The Indian company said its vaccine had yet to undergo clinical trial, but it called for government assistance to help speed up the process.
The current Zika outbreak has not yet spread to India.
The managing director of Bharat Biotech, Dr Krishna Ella, said they had been working on the vaccine for the last year.
He said the early stages of a Zika virus infection were indistinguishable from two other diseases also transmitted by the aedes aegypti mosquito, dengue fever and Chikungunya.
Like Dengue, people who catch Chikungunya also suffer a high fever and crippling joint pain.
Dr Ella said Bharat Biotech had already begun conducting trials on a vaccine for Chikungunya, and the similarity between it and Zika led the company to patent two “candidate vaccines” for Zika.
“We thought as a company, it will be wonderful to have a combination vaccine of Japanese encephalitis, chikengunya and zika as a combined vaccine,” Dr Ella said.
Zika was actually recorded in India around the same time it was first recognised in the early ’50s.
Because its own symptoms are relatively mild, it was not deemed a priority until evidence of its link to the birth defect microcephaly.
Dr Ella is appealing to the Indian government to help the company fast-track clinical trials.
“We are ready now, in another 2 weeks we might be starting [an] animal trial. We have a lot of problems in India,” he said.
“At the moment we can’t speculate how fast they want to move the clinical trial.
“Unless the Government helps us it will be very difficult for us to move forward.”
Dr Ella said that they had conducted the clinical trials according to international standards.
And he said they had the expertise to develop a clinical program that would meet global standards.
“But what is a problem is how fast the Government can facilitate the process,” he said.
Dr Ella estimated that if both WHO and the Indian Government helped them, they could have the vaccine on the market in less than three years.
But he said that at the moment their timeframe was still in years, not months.
“We can only produce a vaccine; the international regulatory agency has to decide how fast they want to move,” he said.
The international effort to develop and test an Ebola vaccine was proof that the trial process could be expedited, said Dr Ella.
Dr Ella is planning to meet with Indian regulators next week.