US Ebola Vaccine Trial Reports Positive Results
My thanks go to health sciences this day.
An experimental vaccine against Ebola virus appears safe and commands a strong immune response against the virus, according to tests in 20 healthy people in the United States. The results of the ‘phase 1’ trial appear online today in the New England Journal of Medicine1.
“All in all, I would say it was a successful phase 1 study,” says Anthony Fauci, the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland, which co-developed the drug with the London-based drug company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). “The next steps are to move ahead with a larger efficacy trial in West Africa.”
The vaccine is similar —- but not identical — to one that is on track to be tested in larger trials in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, which are likely begin in early 2015. In these phase 2 and phase 3 trials, thousands of people who are at risk of contracting the virus, such as health workers, will receive the vaccine, in order to determine whether it can protect against infection
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