Japanese pharmaceutical firm Takeda has announced that its dengue vaccine candidate, TAK-003, prevented 84% of hospitalized dengue cases and 61% of symptomatic dengue cases, with no important safety risks identified, in the overall population including both seropositive and seronegative individuals through four and a half years (54 months) after vaccination in the pivotal Phase 3 Tetravalent Immunization against Dengue Efficacy Study (TIDES) trial.

“The burden of dengue is far-reaching, and over half of the world’s population is at risk of dengue each year,” said Eng Eong Ooi, Ph.D., M.D., Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore. “There is an urgent need for impactful prevention tools to combat the disease. The long-term TIDES results indicate that TAK-003 could be an important addition to the limited tools we have to prevent dengue, particularly given the demonstrated protection against hospitalizations.”  

The TIDES trial is Takeda’s largest interventional clinical trial to date, enrolling more than 20,000 healthy children and adolescents four to 16 years of age, across eight dengue-endemic countries, over the past four and a half years.

TAK-003 is currently undergoing regulatory review for the prevention of dengue disease in children and adults in the European Union and select dengue-endemic countries.