Testing for Ebola vaccines to start soon

Published 12:00 am Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Health authorities and pharmaceutical companies are planning to test several new vaccines to prevent Ebola infection over the next few months, including one that is taken as a tablet, making it easier to deploy in West Africa.

The plans signify that a response to the Ebola outbreak is gathering steam. It is unclear if any of these vaccines will work, however, and even if they do, they may not be ready in time to help stem the current epidemic.

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Starting in January, two vaccines will be tested in large studies in the West African countries most affected by the outbreak, the World Health Organization said Tuesday. At least three other vaccines will begin safety testing in healthy volunteers outside the outbreak zone in the first quarter of 2015.

One of those three is actually a combination of two inoculations being developed by Johnson & Johnson and Bavarian Nordic, a Danish company. Johnson & Johnson announced this morning it was committing $200 million to the program, including making an equity investment of about $43 million in Bavarian Nordic to help pay for that company’s part in the project. It plans to begin safety trials in January and hopes to produce 1 million doses in 2015, with 250,000 available for broad application in clinical trials by May.

“Typically, you don’t make hundreds of thousands of vaccines before you know what the safety and immunogenicity is,” said Dr. Paul Stoffels, chief scientific officer of Johnson & Johnson. “This time, we will do that.”

The two most advanced vaccines in terms of development are each undergoing testing in about 250 healthy adult volunteers in the United States and other countries outside the outbreak region. One of the vaccines was developed by the National Institutes of Health and GlaxoSmithKline.

There are various scientific and ethical issues to be worked out, including who should receive the vaccine and whether it would be ethical to give some participants a placebo instead. Initial studies are likely to involve health care workers but might also involve others at high risk of infection.

“We are doing everything we can to produce as many doses as we can as quickly as we can,” said Dr. Ripley Ballou, who leads the vaccine effort for GlaxoSmithKline.

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