Fever pace for Zika

In less than two years since emerging as a global threat, the Zika virus has prompted an unprecedented acceleration of public and private translational research that has already put three vaccine candidates in the clinic. The payoff is not just charity: drug developers have a good chance of seeing new technologies that have lingered in development make it to market for the first time.

To some degree, the field got lucky with research on the related dengue virus having paved the way with key information about flavivirus biology, such as which antigens were likely to be immunogenic. Likewise, dogged experimentation in multiple diseases generated a suite of next-generation technologies ripe for use. But the catalyst for combining these to produce viable clinical candidates in record time was the urgency created by Zika, following lessons learned from the prior Ebola epidemic that caught the infectious disease community off guard...