October 17, 2014
By Krystle Vermes, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Britain-based biopharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline said today that its vaccine for Ebola won’t be ready in time to combat the current outbreak of epidemic ravaging West Africa.
The company has been developing a vaccine in conjunction with the U.S. National Institutes of Health since the beginning of 2014, according to City A.M.
The head of Ebola vaccine research said this morning that it would not be possible to deploy the vaccine soon due to a lack of safety and efficacy information, which will not become available until late 2015.
"At the same time, we have to be able to manufacture the vaccine at doses that would be consistent with general use, and that's going to take well into 2016 to be able to do that," Ripley Bailou, the head of Ebola vaccine research at GlaxoSmithKline, told the BBC.
Bailou continued to say that if the vaccine being created by GlaxoSmithKline does not end up working, there are other vaccines being developed that could potentially handle a future outbreak.
Testing Vaccinations on Humans
Back in August, GlaxoSmithKline announced that a candidate Ebola vaccine could potentially be given to healthy volunteers in the U.K., then Gambia and Mali as early as September. This would be a part of safety trials designed to determine the effectiveness of vaccines that could prevent Ebola.
The human trials of the candidate vaccine were being promoted in part with the U.S. National Institutes of Health. An international consortium also funded the trials, which were set to begin as soon as they received ethical and regulatory approvals.
A $4.5 million grant from the Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council and the UK Department for International Development gave a research team the final push it needed to begin safety tests.
“The tragic events unfolding in Africa demand an urgent response,” said Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford, who led the research team. “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.”
More than 4,000 people have died as a result of this outbreak of Ebola, according to the World Health Organization, most of them in West Africa.