Hilleman labs partners with Indian Government for shigella vaccine

India’s Hilleman Laboratories and the National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases (NICED) are set to develop and market a vaccine for shigella, a bacterium which featured among those recognised by the WHO as "the greatest threat to human health".

Of dysentery-causing bacteria, shigella is second only to Rotavirus in terms of fatalities within children and responsible for 164,000 across the world according to the 2015 Global Burden of Disease report. There is currently no approved vaccine for the disease.

GSK’s Vaccines Institute for Global Health is known to also be working on a shigella vaccine, while Immuron has also joined the race by partnering with the US Army’s biomedical research lab Walter Reed Army of Research. Hilleman’s vaccine differs from competing products by merit of its orally-administered design that targets four strains of shigella.

"We think that, putting all of this knowledge together, we can come up with something very different from what others have tried. It would probably have a better chance of success," explained Hilleman CEO Davinder Gill.

Under the partnership, Hilleman is due to begin the first testing of the vaccine in humans this year.