A Battle Won In The Fight Against Ebola

April 30, 2015- Now that a new ebola vaccine has shown promise in human trials, researchers look to proceed to more testing and phase 2 efficacy trials in outbreak regions.

Here are the highlights of a recent HealthDay News post by Robert Preidt on the subject, "New Ebola Vaccine Shows Promise in Human Trials," sourced from The Lancet and published online at Philly.com.

• In the trial, researchers gave 120 healthy adults in China either a low or high dose of the vaccine, or a placebo. After twenty-eight days, 38 of 40 people in the low-dose group and all 40 of those in the high-dose group showed an immune response to the vaccine.

• The study authors note that while the results suggest the vaccine is effective and safe — no serious side effects occurred among the participants who received the vaccine — more long-term testing is needed to determine whether it can actually protect people against Ebola.

• The vaccine, developed by the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology and Tianjin CanSino Biotechnology in China with additional funding by China National Science and Technology, is based on the strain of Ebola that has been circulating in the West African outbreak. Previously, all tested Ebola vaccines have been based on the Ebola strain from the 1976 outbreak in Zaire.

• "On the basis of our findings, we believe that the Ebola vaccine we assessed has some potential, and a significant advantage of this type of vaccine is that [it is] stable and much easier to store or transport in tropical areas with inadequate cold-chain capacity, such as Africa," said research team leader Fengcai Zhu, quoted in the post. "Whether this candidate vaccine could become a final vaccine for widespread use against Ebola outbreaks is still uncertain," Zhu added. "Furthermore, these results only assess immune response up to 28 days, so we plan to assess the persistence of the specific immune response by following up the vaccine recipients of this study."

• The West African Ebola outbreak, while ebbing, is not yet over. Preidt notes that, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost 25,000 probable or confirmed cases have been detected in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, including more than 10,000 deaths.

• Preidt notes two experts, Darryl Falzarano, of the University of Saskatchewan in Canada and Andrea Marzi, of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who write, "This vaccine is an example of how quickly existing vaccine platforms can be modified to incorporate a new virus strain, and moved, with minimum testing in animals, into trials in humans during a crisis situation." "However, they add, "Ultimately, the effectiveness of all these vaccines will only become clear when they proceed to phase 2 efficacy trials in outbreak regions."

Read the full Philly.com post here.

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