Clinical trials of vaccines for the deadly Ebola virus should soon get underway and will likely be ready for widespread use by early next year, the World Health Organization has said.
“I think it’s realistic,” Marie-Paule Kieny, assistant director-general of the UN health agency, told AFP.
There is currently no available cure or vaccine for Ebola, one of the deadliest viruses known to man, but Kieny said she expected a vaccine to be rushed through the trial process and become available by 2015.
Her colleague Jean-Marie Okwo Bele, who is vaccine chief at WHO, told French radio RFI earlier Saturday that British pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline appeared set to start clinical trials of a vaccine next month.
He also said he was optimistic about making the vaccine commercially available.
“Since this is an emergency, we can put emergency procedures in place ... so that we can have a vaccine available by 2015,” he said.
Kieny acknowledged however that any vaccine rushed to market to help stem the epidemic, which has already claimed nearly 1,000 lives in west Africa, would not be tested as rigorously as other vaccines and drugs.
