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Business News/ News / World/  Ebola vaccine developed by GSK, NIH shows acceptable safety profile
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Ebola vaccine developed by GSK, NIH shows acceptable safety profile

The experimental Ebola vaccine has shown an acceptable safety profile and immunity response in all tested doses

The scientists have said the experimental vaccine is ready to be tested in the Ebola-affected areas in Africa. Photo: Bloomberg Premium
The scientists have said the experimental vaccine is ready to be tested in the Ebola-affected areas in Africa. Photo: Bloomberg

New Delhi: An experimental Ebola vaccine being developed by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has shown an acceptable safety profile and immunity response in all tested doses, according to results of a trial conducted at Oxford University.

“The vaccine was well tolerated. Its safety profile is pretty much as we had hoped," said Adrian Hill of the Jenner Institute at Oxford University, who led the trial. The trial findings are published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

The vaccine is being developed against the Zaire strain of Ebola, which has caused the current epidemic in West Africa, killing more than 8,500 people in the most-affected countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, as of Tuesday.

The scientists have said the experimental vaccine is ready to be tested in the Ebola-affected areas in Africa. The first doses for use in large-scale trials have been delivered to Liberia by GSK.

The vaccine is based on an attenuated strain of chimpanzee cold virus, called chimp adenovirus type 3 (ChAd3), which delivers non-harmful genetic material derived from the Ebola virus. The vaccine cannot get a person infected with Ebola as it does not contain infectious virus material.

As part of the trial, 60 healthy volunteers were vaccinated between September and November. The volunteers received one of three different vaccine doses so that a third of volunteers received low dose vaccine, a third received middle dose and a third received high dose.

The experimental vaccine was well tolerated at all three doses. Most adverse events reported by the volunteers were mild in severity such as a moderate fever within 24 hours of receiving the vaccine which passed in a day.

Safety data and immune responses for the volunteers for 28 days after immunization were reported. Follow-up of the volunteers will continue beyond these initial data until six months after the volunteers received the experimental vaccine.

“The results are very encouraging in terms of the safety profile of the vaccine. That is the main outcome from this trial," Hill said in a statement issued by Oxford University. “Larger trials in West Africa will be able to tell us more. We are also currently assessing another option, involving a booster dose, for improving immune response levels."

The UK trial is funded by the Wellcome Trust, Medical Research Council and Department for International Development.

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Published: 29 Jan 2015, 07:46 AM IST
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