THE second part of a crucial Ebola drug trial has begun in Oxford, as the death toll from the outbreak reaches 6000.
SCIENTISTS want to discover if a second booster injection would increase the protection of aid workers and health professionals treating those infected with the killer virus in West Africa.
Half of the 60 healthy volunteers who received the experimental Ebola vaccine at the Jenner Institute at Oxford University in November will now receive a follow up vaccine as part of the ongoing trial. It is one of several safety trials across the world of the candidate vaccine developed by Glaxo-Smith-Kline and the US National Institutes of Health that were fast-tracked in response to the Ebola outbreak. Professor Adrian Hill, who is leading the trial at Oxford University’s Jenner Institute, said the aim of the trial is to determine the safety of the two vaccines used in combination, and whether the second booster vaccine can increase immune responses further. “If a single dose of an Ebola vaccine is sufficient, it makes absolute sense to use that,” Prof Hill said. “But it also makes sense at this early stage of trials to see if a second booster vaccine can greatly increase the levels of immune responses produced.” The experimental vaccine does not contain infectious Ebola virus material and will not cause a person taking part in the trial to be infected. So far, the experiment has triggered promising immune responses from 20 healthy volunteers taking part in a preliminary trial, but it won’t be until larger trials in West Africa next year that the effectiveness of the vaccine will be known. Ebola has infected nearly 17,000 people, of whom about 6000 have died, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).