A healthy Briton is to become the first person to receive a potential new vaccine for the Ebola virus.
The UK volunteer will be given the candidate vaccine in a safety trial being conducted by experts at the University of Oxford. The person will be the first of 60 to receive the experimental drug in the UK trial. The testing is part of a series of safety trials of potential vaccines to fight the virus, which could offer hope to the thousands facing the illness in West Africa where an outbreak has killed around 53% of those infected.
The vaccine uses a single benign Ebola virus protein to generate an immune response. The university said the vaccine does not contain infectious Ebola virus material and will not cause a person taking part in the trial to be infected. The trials are conducted on healthy people to see whether they suffer any side effects. The testing will also assess whether those given the jab generate a good immune response.
The vaccine has shown promising results when tested on animals. Pre-clinical research indicated that it provided protection for humanlike animals exposed to Ebola without any significant harmful side effects.
A £2.8 million grant was awarded to the research center making trials of the vaccine. The funding will also allow GSK to begin manufacturing 10,000 additional doses of the vaccine at the same time as the initial clinical trials. If it is successful, the drug will be tested in Gambia and Mali to ensure the studies take into account differences between European and West African populations.
In August, when the trial was announced, Professor Adrian Hill who is leading the research team, said: “The tragic events unfolding in Africa demand an urgent response. In recent years, similar investigational vaccines have safely immunized infants and adults against a range of diseases including malaria, HIV and hepatitis C. We, and all our partners on this project, are optimistic that this candidate vaccine may prove useful against Ebola.”
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