Daily Dose: Recombinant Zoster Vaccine Provides 10 Years of Protection

Patient Care brings primary care clinicians a lot of medical news every day—it’s easy to miss an important study. The Daily Dose provides a concise summary of one of the website's leading stories you may not have seen.

On October 25, 2022, we reviewed a study presented at IDWeek 2022, held from October 19 to 23, in Washington, DC, that examined the long-term safety and efficacy of an adjuvanted recombinant zoster vaccine (RZV; Shingrix, GSK) in adults aged ≥50 years.

The study

The data, presented for the first time at IDWeek, were from the ZOSTER-049 trial, an extension study with participants from the ZOE-50 and ZOE-70 phase 3 clinical trials. The primary objective of the interim analysis was to determine the efficacy of RZV against herpes zoster during the initial 4-year follow-up period in ZOSTER-049.

The results

Efficacy of RZV against herpes zoster infection over the >4 years of long-term follow-up, representing up to 10 years since participant immunization, was 81.6%. Between 1 month post-second dose and year 4, vaccine efficacy in the in the ZOE-50 and ZOE-70 studies was 89%.

Clinical implications

"The findings from ZOE-LTFU demonstrate that it can provide a decade of protection against the pain, debilitating impact, and potentially severe complications that shingles can cause in people aged 50 and over," said Sabine Luik, GSK chief medical officer and SVP global medical regulatory & quality, in a statement. "These data significantly add to, and complement, the existing body of evidence demonstrating the long-term benefit of the vaccine, and we look forward to seeing additional results from this ongoing study.”

Click here for the full study review.