Johnson & Johnson has made an exciting discovery in the fight against dengue fever. Dengue is a serious disease that currently has no specific treatment. In a recent study, ten volunteers took a high dose of a new J&J pill five days before being intentionally exposed to dengue. They continued taking the pill for 21 days after the exposure.
The amazing part is that six of these participants had no dengue virus in their blood, and they didn’t show any signs of an immune response to the virus for 85 days. This is a big deal because, until now, we didn’t have a specific medicine for dengue.
Dengue is a big problem in places like Asia and Latin America, where it causes millions of infections and tens of thousands of deaths every year. The next step is to see if the pill can be used as a treatment. It seems like the pill can stop the virus from making more copies of itself by blocking two viral proteins.
But there’s a challenge. We need to make sure this new medicine is available to people, especially in poorer countries where dengue is common. This situation is similar to the issues faced by the dengue vaccine that the World Health Organization recently approved.
Johnson & Johnson is working on making the new medicine accessible, but this work is still in the early stages. As the threat of dengue grows because of climate change, having effective treatments is more important than ever.
