Greenberg discusses U.S., India partnership that led to rotavirus vaccine

During his recent three-day visit to India, President Barack Obama issued a joint statement with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi praising the “highly successful collaboration” that led to the availability of a newly developed Indian rotavirus vaccine, which is expected to save 80,000 children in India alone each year.

The vaccine was developed with support from the Indo-U.S. Vaccine Action Program, co-chaired since 2009 by Harry Greenberg, MD, senior associate dean for research at the Stanford School of Medicine. Greenberg, who also is professor of gastroenterology and hepatology and of microbiology and immunology, was the lead inventor of the first-generation vaccine for rotavirus, a severe diarrheal disease that kills between 300,000 and 400,000 children each in the developing world.

“This is the VAP’s biggest accomplishment to date,” Greenberg said. “The program really helped support the development of a safe and effective rotavirus vaccine from the start to finish. And it’s the first time ever that a new vaccine was developed in a less-developed country by and for that country and became licensed.”

The vaccine initiative, funded by the U.S. Public Health Service and the Indian government, was created in 1987 to help advance the development of new vaccines of importance to India. The NIH manages research grants in the United States for the vaccine program.

“The VAP has been the most successful, continuous program we have with India,” Roger Glass, MD, PhD, director of the NIH’s Fogarty International Center, wrote in an email to top NIH officials. “It’s amazing to me that this little research project on rotavirus with Harry Greenberg and George Curlin [former deputy director of NIH’s Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases] has turned into a real product that is being launched and will be used.”

A low-cost version of the vaccine, known as Rotavac, is being manufactured in India and was launched into the marketplace on Jan. 23, Greenberg said. It was the result of an unusual team effort involving diverse multinational groups of investigators from 13 institutions seeking to create a vaccine that was not only safe and effective, but also affordable enough for use in India and other low-income countries, he said. The Indian government is negotiating to purchase the vaccine for public distribution. The vaccine also will compete in the private market against at least two other commercially available vaccines.

In the Jan. 25 joint statement, Obama and Modi pledged continued support for the vaccine program, and Greenberg, who recently stepped down from his chairmanship, made an argument at the group’s last meeting for now focusing the attention of the vaccine partnership on respiratory syncytial virus, a potentially serious lung disease that is prevalent in children in India and in other regions as well.

“RSV is an incredibly important pediatric pathogen all over the world, and there is now potential for great progress,” Greenberg said. “I suggested to VAP that it think about RSV as a new target for research. It has a huge public impact and it may well be that there are great advances to be made in the near future. I think that idea resonated with the people. We will see.”