EbolaSubjects produce immune response, develop antibodies in Ebola vaccine test
All twenty research subjects recruited by the University of Maryland School of Medicine in partnership with the National Institute of Health (NIH) to test an experimental Ebola vaccine developed by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in collaboration with drug maker, GlaxoSmithKline, have produced an immune response and developed anti-Ebola antibodies. Half of the research participants were initially injected with ten billion particles of a chimpanzee cold virus modified to resemble Ebola, while the other half received a dose with ten times as many particles.
All twenty research subjects recruited by the University of Maryland School of Medicine in partnership with the National Institute of Health (NIH) to test an experimental Ebola vaccine developed by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in collaboration with drug maker, GlaxoSmithKline, have produced an immune response and developed anti-Ebola antibodies. Half of the research participants were initially injected with ten billion particles of a chimpanzee cold virus modified to resemble Ebola, while the other half received a dose with ten times as many particles. According to the Baltimore Sun, the variation helps researchers learn how much vaccine a patient needs to create immunity and how long the immunity lasts.
This particular vaccine contains proteins that convinces the immune system into treating the chimpanzee virus as Ebola. The research subjects’ immune response are now being compared with that of monkeys who were issued the vaccine and then exposed to Ebola. “Based on these positive results from the first human trial of this candidate vaccine, we are continuing our accelerated plan for larger trials to determine if the vaccine is efficacious in preventing Ebola infection,” said Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID.
The concern over Ebola, which has now killed at least 5,680 people in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, has provided Ebola researchers new opportunities to further their work. Within the past year, Baltimore-based Profectus BioSciences has received $32 million from the Pentagon, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, other U.S. agencies to advance its development of Ebola vaccines. The company had struggled for years to raise money to pay for human trials, but now expects to begin trials next year.
Professor Andrew Easton, a leading virologist at Britain’s Warwick University, cautions that though the University of Maryland vaccine trial provided some optimism on the road to developing an Ebola vaccine, researchers still have plenty of unanswered questions. “We know from some of the preliminary work that went on in animal studies previously that the antibodies that are generated in response to the vaccine don’t last as long as we would like — there was a clear reduction over a fairly long period of time, about 10 months,” he said. “So it’s possible that that might be a problem in humans, but the reality is we won’t know until it’s actually been tested in humans.” Easton adds that if the vaccine fails to provide long-term protection from the Ebola virus, then perhaps it could be used to protect people from Ebola at the time outbreaks occur.
