Health - First Ebola Vaccine Trial from GSK and NIAID Seems to work.

Doctors have reported on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine that the first test of Ebola vaccine in people show that it is safe and appears to be working as anticipated.

A look at the first 20 people injected with the vaccine, which has been shown to protect monkeys from Ebola, shows no dangerous side effects. And it seems to be producing an immune response that would be expected to protect them from infection.

The trial, which began on Sept. 2 will have the volunteers monitored for 48 weeks, this is primarily aimed at assessing how safe the vaccine is. But the immune response offered hope that it would also be effective.

"This response is very comparable to the level of the response that actually protected the animals," said Dr. Tony Fauci, head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which helped develop and test the vaccine. He also stated that The safety profile  for the test is encouraging, as is the finding that the higher dose of vaccine induced an immune response quite comparable to that which has completely protected (lab) animals from Ebola.

NIAID is working with vaccine maker GlaxoSmithKline to develop this vaccine, which uses a common cold virus called an adenovirus that normally infects chimpanzees. It does not cause any symptoms in people. It is genetically engineered with a small piece of Ebola virus and, in theory, should enable the immune system's ability to recognize and attack 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," Fauci said.

The worst side-effect was a brief fever in two volunteers who got a high dose of the vaccine."That is not unexpected with some vaccines. In fact you get that with a lot of different vaccines," Fauci said. It doesn't mean anything harmful has happened but shows the immune system has been stimulated. He also ensured to state that the fever was very transient andI lasted less than 24 hours."

Ebola is raging through Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. more than 15,000 people are infected and 5,000 of them killed. Experts have fast-tracked vaccines and treatments for Ebola because of the epidemic, even though they know they won't be able to use them any time soon to try to control it.

The World Health Organization says 588 health care workers have been infected with Ebola and 337 have died of it. The hope is to be able to make enough vaccine to at least protect health care workers fighting the epidemic.

The same vaccine is being tested at the University of Maryland, in Britain and in Mali. A trial 
of an Ebola vaccine from Johnson & Johnson is scheduled to start in January. Another GlaxoSmithKline vaccine, against the Zaire strain, is undergoing safety trials in England, Mali and Switzerland, 

Report By - MrLylkyd

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