Life Sciences & Medicine Active Updated Aug 19, 2026
A shigellosis vaccine clears its biggest human trial yet
Shigellosis kills more than a million people a year, nearly half of them children under five, and more than a century of vaccine attempts had failed, partly due to a lack of research funding for diarrheal disease. A Walter Reed-developed candidate called WRSs2 just posted the best protection rate the field has ever recorded in a human challenge trial, and the stakes are whether that holds up in the children and low-resource, endemic settings the vaccine is actually meant for.
The story so far
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Aug 19, 2026 Latest
A Walter Reed Army Institute of Research vaccine candidate called WRSs2 protected adults from shigellosis 89 percent of the time in a human challenge trial published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, versus 81 percent of unvaccinated participants who got sick, the best result the field has ever recorded for a disease that kills more than a million people a year, most of them children under five.
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