Three researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Medicine filed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a new dengue virus vaccine.

The filing was made public on Thursday.

Aravinda de Silva, principal investigator at de Silva Laboratory in UNC’s School of Medicine, filed the application with Stefan Metz, a research associate in the lab, and Michael Miley, co-director of the UNC Center for Structural Biology.

De Silva, who is from Sri Lanka and previously attended Vassar College and Yale University’s School of Medicine, said he is most interested in vector-borne infectious diseases and focuses his research on the dengue and zika viruses.

The dengue virus, also known as breakbone fever, is usually transmitted to humans by mosquitoes and is a leading cause of illness and death in the tropics and subtropics. Symptoms include fever, rash and muscular pain. According to the Centers for Disease Control, more than 400 million people worldwide are infected annually.

Dengue fever and dengue hemorrhagic fever are widely distributed in tropical and subtropical regions, and the disease is endemic in over 100 countries. There are no approved vaccines for dengue.

According to the application “the present invention is directed to flavivirus vaccines that induce neutralizing antibodies.”

The patent application said that the vaccine’s development was made with government support under a grant awarded by the National Institutes of Health. The United States government has certain rights to the vaccine.

The complete filing can be found here.