The World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Friday it expected to begin small-scale use of two experimental Ebola vaccines in West Africa early next year and in the meantime transfusions of survivors’ blood may offer the best hope of treatment.
WHO is working with pharmaceutical companies and regulators to accelerate the use of a range of potential treatments to fight the disease, a senior WHO official said. Ebola has no cure and has killed at least 3,091 out of 6,574 people infected in West Africa since an outbreak began in March.
GlaxoSmithKline has begun clinical trials of its vaccine in the United States and Britain, to be followed by a trial starting in Mali next week, while NewLink vaccine trials are about to start in the United States and Germany, said Dr. Marie-Paule Kieny, WHO assistant director-general.
“If everything goes well again we might be able to start to use some of these vaccines in affected countries at the very beginning of next year, in January. This will not be a mass vaccination campaign, let’s be clear about that because the quantity which will be available doesn’t make this possible,” Kieny told a news briefing in Geneva.
She stressed however that the shots were experimental and had not yet been shown to work against Ebola: “They have given very promising results in monkeys, but monkeys are not humans.
“We could still face a situation where these vaccines would be unsafe in humans or where they would do nothing in terms of protection. So we need to be very prudent.”
Data will be collected from clinical trials when the experimental vaccines are being given to healthy volunteers who are then monitored for adverse side effects and to see if the shot elicits an immune response in their blood.
Regulators at the European Medicines Agency (EMA) said on Friday they would begin reviewing data on experimental Ebola medicines to support any decisions made on whether to use them for treating patients.
Canada has given 800 vials of the NewLink candidate vaccine to WHO, expected to yield at least 1,500 doses, Kieny said. The US-based firm is “working very hard to produce a few more thousand doses in the coming months,” she added.
GSK has said it hopes to have 10,000 doses of its experimental vaccine by the end of this year.
Kieny said an experimental Ebola vaccine being developed by Johnson & Johnson but not yet ready for trials in humans was also under consideration.
