Ebola vaccine from Glaxo promising and safe

Empower & Inspire: Spread Health & Wellness

A 39-year-old woman has become the first volunteer to receive an experimental Ebola vaccine, which scientists have described as “promising”.

Researchers from the National Institutes for Health (NIH) and GSK reported promising initial findings from early human tests for one of two Ebola vaccines destined for West Africa, the first in a flurry of results expected by the end of the year.

The vaccine, called ChAD3, uses a modified chimpanzee adenovirus and was developed by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the NIH, and GSK.

This experimental Ebola vaccine caused no serious side effects and produced an immune response in all 20 healthy volunteers who received it in an early-stage clinical trial, scientists reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The trial, which began on Sept. 2 and will monitor the volunteers for 48 weeks, is primarily aimed at assessing how safe the vaccine is. But the immune response offered hope that it would also be effective.

The safety profile is encouraging, as is the finding that the higher dose of vaccine induced an immune response quite comparable to that which has completely protected (lab) animals from Ebola.

Source: National Institutes of Health, USA


Leave a Comment

Health Newstrack