Butantan will initially be able to produce 10 million doses of dengue vaccine, says secretary

O Butantan Institute would have initial production capacity for 10 million doses of its vaccine dengue, a product that is in the final testing phase and is expected to be available on the market from next year. Information on production capacity was provided by the São Paulo state health secretary, Eleuses Paivain an interview with Eldorado Radio this Thursday, 28th.

There are high expectations regarding the approval of the product due to the fact that it has the same effectiveness of the vaccine currently available in the SUS, from the Japanese manufacturer Takeda (around 80%), but with the advantage of being a single dose and having national production, which would reduce the cost. The vaccination schedule for the Asian pharmaceutical company’s vaccine is carried out in two doses, with an interval of three months between doses.

Despite the optimism regarding the Brazilian vaccine, the limited production capacity of both the international manufacturer and Butantan shows that it will be difficult to vaccinate the majority of the population against the disease anytime soon.

In this year’s campaign, Takeda only made around 6 million doses available to the Ministry of Health, which limited the number of people immunized to 3 million people. Therefore, the federal ministry restricted vaccination to children and adolescents aged 10 to 14 from a few hundred Brazilian municipalities in a more worrying epidemiological situation. With the possible 10 million doses initially foreseen by Butantan, the campaign would probably continue restricted to a very specific age group.

Paiva said, however, that there is an effort at Butantan to increase this production capacity. “We intend to scale the production level to 40 million doses”, he pointed out, without detailing the schedule for possible expansion.

Asked about the forecast for the production of these 10 million doses, the Butantan Institute’s press office was unable to provide information. Despite this, the institute confirmed that the production capacity for manufacturing doses is being expanded.

In an interview with Estadão in January, the director of the Butantan Institute, Esper Kallás, stated that the institution intends to complete clinical studies between June and July and submit the registration application to Anvisa in the second semester.

“We still have a lot of work to do at home until we finish the complete dossier. Our deadline is the second semester and we have a target of September, but we have to face this with great humility because, sometimes, we need to repeat some analyses, so this target may be mobile, but we are working to try to anticipate”, he highlighted at the time.

In the interview with Eldorado radio, the secretary also updated the dengue numbers in the state of São Paulo. In 2024 alone, more than 800,000 cases of the disease were reported and 345,000 were confirmed. In addition, 146 deaths due to dengue were confirmed in the period.

He stated that the State has not yet reached the peak of the epidemic this year. He said that the secretariat is working with two possibilities: peak in two weeks or at the end of April / beginning of May and stated that the network of health units is prepared for the demand.