Glaxo, a pharmaceutical house in Britain, is working rapidly on its anti-ebola vaccine. They project that if all goes well during the studies and trials and if Glaxo really pushes the vaccine development and production, they may have 230,000 does of vaccine available by April. Vaccines are also under study and being developed in a number of other countries: China, the UK, France, Canada are all doing vaccine research. And there are other companies in the US who are doing it as well. You’ve probably heard of Johnson and Johnson, they’re working on a vaccine. But you may not have heard of NewLink a young, small company run by an oncologist.
New Link is using a somewhat different technology and approach than the other Big Pharma groups.
Come below the contorting shepherd’s crook virus for more.
Technically they’re using an animal virus (vesiclular stomatitis virus (VSV) and attaching pieces of ebola to the animal virus base. The Ebola present will serve as antigens to stimulate antibodies from the patients own immune system. If enough functional antibodies get formed, the person becomes immune to that strain of Ebola. New Link estimates that if everything goes as planned, they could have about 12 million doses of their vaccine ready to go by April, 2015.
There are some potential problems with this plan. First off, the researchers aren’t sure if they need to pack 1,000,000 viral particles per does or 10,000,000 particles per dose that will be determined in upcoming studies. If 10,000,000 particles need to be used the total number of available does would decrease significantly. There may be some evidence that a dose of even lower than 1,000,000 might work. That;s something else they're working on. But, if 12 million working doses are produced, that would be enough to immunize the majority of people in the Ebola area now. And that’s not including other vaccines that might be supplied by Glaxo, Johnson and Johnson, the Russians, Chinese and others. Once a sizable proportion of the inhabitants get immunized, the outbreak can be controlled, localized and usually wiped out.
There are some downsides.
NewLink is a small company (100+ employees) they’ll need to scale up to produce huge quantities of vaccine. They are talking to a member of Big Pharma to see if they can work up a deal to get t hem to produce more doses.
A similar vaccine, though not directed against Ebola, was tried several years ago. The woman that they designed it for developed a high temperature and flu-like symptoms.. Obviously, developing a fever in an Ebola area might make patients think that they had Ebola when they didn’t. Some work is underway to see if this effect can be minimized.
Also the “carrier” virus is Vesicular Stomatitis Virus. VSV can infect livestock. It’s unclear if this VSV could infect food animals or not. They are investigating that right now. If it does infect food animals, the animals are quarantined to prevent it’s spread. So people who get this Ebola vaccine may need to stay away from food animals for a few weeks.
Additionally, live attenuated vaccines are generally not given to AIDS patients or other patients with immune system compromise. If that turns out to be the case with the New Link Ebola vaccine, then those with AIDS would still be unprotected, by this vaccine. Other vaccines that use killed virus may work for them.
More work needs to be done in research and clinical trials. The FDA has promised that they will speed appropriate drugs through testing because of this emergency.
There are also other small bioresearch firms, like NewLink working on Ebola viruses on their own. So, in addition to the other vaccines presented, there may be others in the pipeline soon.
However, in the meantime, we still have to follow the CDC guidelines for Africa. Diagnose, isolate, treat, give fluids, test for Ebola, wear PPE, medicate, etc. And report and tabulate cases, track contacts, gather the data, etc.
So while millions of doses of vaccines available in the spring would be fantastic, that may not happen because of production problems, safety issues, efficacy, etc. It is very encouraging since so many groups are moving along rapidly. And some of the very early (safety trials) look good.
http://www.sciencemag.org/...