Ebola vaccines could be available early 2015, says WHO

The World Health Organization has issued an assessment of the situation regarding two candidate Ebola vaccines following a consultation event earlier this week.

The aim was to establish the efforts to evaluate Ebola vaccines for safety and efficacy, in order to make them available as soon as possible and ultimately use them in a mass vaccination campaign. The WHO regards the expedited evaluation of all Ebola vaccines with clinical grade material as a high priority. Two candidate vaccines have clinical-grade vials available for Phase I pre-licensure clinical trials.

One (cAd3-ZEBOV) has been developed by UK pharma major GlaxoSmithKline (LSE: GSK) in collaboration with the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It uses a chimpanzee-derived adenovirus vector with an Ebola virus gene inserted. The second (rVSV-ZEBOV) was developed by the Public Health Agency of Canada in Winnipeg. The license for commercialization of the Canadian vaccine is held by an American company, NewLink Genetics. The vaccine uses an attenuated or weakened vesicular stomatitis virus, a pathogen found in livestock; one of its genes has been replaced by an Ebola virus gene.

Phase I trials