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posted by martyb on Tuesday October 24 2017, @12:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the getting-on-your-nerves dept.

https://www.statnews.com/2017/10/20/shingles-vaccine-approval/

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved a second shingles vaccine, giving pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline a go-ahead to market Shingrix in the United States.

The FDA approval marks the second regulatory green light for the vaccine in a week's time. Last Friday Shingrix was approved for sale in Canada. Regulatory filings are also in the works for the European Union, Australia, and Japan, GSK said.

The vaccine offered 98 percent protection in the first year and that protection remained at 85 percent or higher three years after vaccination — stronger protection than the only other shingles vaccine on the market, Merck's Zostavax.

GSK has been keenly awaiting the FDA's ruling, eager to get to market a vaccine analysts estimate could reach $1 billion a year in sales by 2022.

Also at FiercePharma and The Pharma Letter.

Wikipedia's entry for shingles (aka herpes zoster).


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @08:29PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @08:29PM (#587078)

    Do you have data wrt shingles in places/time when nobody got vaccinated? It should have mutated like crazy. But the symptoms and the general reaction stayed the same. Hm.

  • (Score: 2) by ledow on Tuesday October 24 2017, @09:34PM

    by ledow (5567) on Tuesday October 24 2017, @09:34PM (#587112) Homepage

    Why would it mutate when it can infect the next human without having to change a single gene?

    Mutations occur all the time anyway, but would rarely be able to compete against a successful (i.e. popular) infection. Remove the popular infection, and the minority, random mutations get free-reign (like flowers growing through a weeded-garden). Only ONE of them need be infectious (part of which it inherits from it's predecessor) and unvaccinated-against and you have a whole new condition spreading through non-immune hosts without any serious competition.

    Mutations are always around anyway, but certainly evolutionary pressures keep them in check most of the time until a clear path aids their promotion to full-blown epidemic.

    To quote one article, though (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/health/healthguide/esn-shingles-expert.html?pagewanted=all):

    "Q: You mentioned that varicella-zoster virus has been around for thousands of years. Has it changed much over that time in the way that other viruses — H.I.V., for example — change or mutate?

    A: ******There’s no evidence that varicella-zoster has gotten more or less potent over the years********, and we also know that it changes at a much, much lower rate than H.I.V. The H.I.V. makes a lot of mistakes when it replicates or divides; varicella-zoster virus is much less error prone in replication. This makes it much easier to develop an effective vaccine, compared to trying to make a vaccine against a virus like H.I.V. that mutates very, very rapidly. The vaccines we have for chickenpox and shingles work partly because the virus cannot escape the immune system’s response to the vaccine, whereas with H.I.V. that’s much more likely to occur. It also makes varicella-zoster virus infections easier to treat because if you develop an antiviral medication, the virus is less likely to become resistant. With H.I.V., it is common to have virus that resists treatment."