French drugmaker Sanofi said Tuesday it expects to launch "within a year" clinical trials that allow them to develop a vaccine against the virus Zika, which could be ready in three years.
This was stated by the CEO of Sanofi, Olivier Brandicourt, during the presentation of the annual results of the group, which in 2015 achieved a net profit of 7,370 million euros (up 7.7% from a year earlier) and a turnover 37,000 million euros (up 2.2% comparable to 2014 data).
"We would be prepared to train virtually in a clinical trial in a year," Brandicourt, who warned that a possible vaccine would not be ready within three years.
The French group hopes to shorten the usual deadlines taking advantage of the technology and infrastructure that has already developed vaccine for dengue, Dengvaxia, a virus from the same family as the Zika.
"We investigated whether there is a cross-immunity between the two viruses, which would be good news," he added the CEO of Sanofi on a virus that is apparently responsible for a large number of cases of microcephaly, which according to the World Health Organization (WHO) is a public health emergency worldwide.
The United States announced yesterday that allocated 1,800 million dollars zika prevention, particularly widespread in Latin America, while the European Medicines Agency set up an expert committee to accelerate research on the virus.
"We rely heavily upon the cooperation of Europe and the United States" because the clinical trials zika "can be very costly," said the head of research at Sanofi, Elias Zerhouni.
The French laboratory immediately invest "several million euros" for the phase prior to clinical trials research.