Sabin Vaccine Institute gets rights to GSK Ebola vaccines technology

UK pharma major GlaxoSmithKline (LSE: GSK) and the Sabin Vaccine Institute (Sabin) today announced exclusive agreements for Sabin to advance the development of the prophylactic candidate vaccines against the deadly Ebola Zaire, Ebola Sudan and the closely related, but lesser known, Marburg virus.

No licensed vaccines against these three viruses are currently available. All three cause hemorrhagic fever with subsequent death in an average of 50 percent of cases. More than 1,600 people have already died during the ongoing Ebola Zaire outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), leading the World Health Organization (WHO) to recently declare it a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.

Under the agreements between the two parties, Sabin has exclusively licensed the technology for all three candidate vaccines and acquired certain patent rights specific to these vaccines. The three candidate vaccines were initially developed collaboratively by the US National Institutes of Health and Swiss firm Okairos, which was acquired by GSK for around $300 million in 2013. The candidate vaccines, based on GSK’s proprietary ChAd3 platform, were further developed by GSK, including the Phase II development for the Ebola Zaire vaccine.