The United States’ second biggest pharmaceuticals company has announced it will buy worldwide commercial rights to an experimental vaccine against the Ebola virus.
NewLink Genetics Corp, whose subsidiary licensed commercial rights to the rVSV-EBOV vaccine in 2010, said it would receive $50 million plus royalties from Merck & Co Inc.
Large late-stage trials of the product could begin early next year, said Merck, one of the world’s biggest makers of vaccines.
Merck, which would be able to speed up and significantly boost production, would take over development of the vaccine and any follow-on products.
The Public Health Agency of Canada, which originally developed the vaccine, would retain non-commercial rights to it.
The deal between Merck and NewLink, a tiny biotechnology company based in Ames, Iowa, came as other drugmakers were also racing to test and scale-up production of treatments and preventive vaccines for Ebola, which has killed more than 5,400 people this year.
It is the worst Ebola outbreak on record. Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia account for all but 15 of the deaths.
The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases were conducting early-stage trials of the NewLink vaccine.
The trials involved healthy volunteers and were testing whether the vaccine was safe and provoked a protective immune response.
If Phase I studies proved favourable, large late-stage trials would be set to begin early next year.
The World Health Organisation was also coordinating early-stage trials in Switzerland, Germany, Kenya and Gabon.
In a regulatory filing on Monday, NewLink said Merck would pay it $30 million upfront and $20 million once larger formal trials begin.
The company would also be eligible to receive royalties on sales in certain markets.
Rival pharmaceutical producer GlaxoSmithKline Plc was developing its own Ebola vaccine and planned to build a stockpile of thousands of doses for emergency deployment if results were good.
Reuters