Bangalore: Luc Aujame, director of External Research at Sanofi Pasteur, France, has said that new vaccines need to be developed as major medical needs remain to be addressed.

He was addressing a seminar on "Vaccines: an R&D focus for the developing world," at Bangalore Bio 2006 here on Thursday.

Talking about the challenges that lay ahead in developing new vaccines, he said that diseases such as malaria and HIV/AIDS did not occur in animals and so adequate animal models were not available for clinical testing.

Diseases such as tuberculosis had re-emerged and stronger vaccines were needed while for HIV/AIDS and malaria vaccines were yet to be discovered, Prof. Aujame pointed out. Vaccines had been found for one out of the six sexually transmitted disease-carrying agents, five out of 11 respiratory agents, three out of eight enteric agents and two out of nine vector-borne agents, he said. Out of the 43 identified disease-carrying agents, vaccines had not yet been found for 30 of them, he said.

G. Padmanabhan, professor emeritus at IISc., termed vaccines as "weapons of mass protection." He said indigenisation of vaccine development would make vaccines affordable to the poor.

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