How Effective is the Aerosolized Measles Vaccine?

While an aerosolized version of the measles vaccine successfully produced an immune response, it was not as effective as the standard subcutaneous vaccine, according to a new study. 

For the open-label non-inferiority trial, researchers assigned 1001 children to receive an aerosolized vaccine, while 1003 children were administered a subcutaneous vaccine. All of the children participating ranged from 9.0 months to 11.9 months of age.
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Primary endpoints of the study were seropositivity for antibodies against measles and the occurrence of adverse evens 91 days following vaccination. The non-inferiority margin was 5 percentage points.

Of the participating children, only data from 1560 children could be analyzed, due to damaged samples.

After 91 days of follow-up, the study showed that 662 of 775 children were seropositive in the aerosol group compared to 742 of 785 children, a -9.2% difference.

Further, the full-analysis findings demonstrated that 85.4% of children in the aerosol group were seropositive at day 91, in contrast to 94.7% of children in the subcutaneous group: a difference of -9.3 percentage points.

The investigators noted that no serious adverse events were associated to the measles vaccination. These profile findings were similar in both of the groups.

The complete study is published in the April issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

-Michelle Canales Butcher

Reference:

Low N, Bavdekar A, Jeyaseelan L, et al. A randomized, controlled trial of an aerosolized vaccine against measles. NEJM. 2015 April [epub ahead of print] doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa1407417.