Vaccines

NBC NEWS by Maggie Fox                                                                             Feb. 19, 2015

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is helping prepare for a new Ebola vaccine trial in Sierra Leone, the country that's now the worst hit by the Ebola epidemic.

The CDC will work with Sierra Leonean authorities to vaccinate up to 6,000 health care workers, including doctors, nurses and ambulance drivers, against a virus that's infected more than 11,000 people in Sierra Leone alone, killing 3,400 of them.

This trial will test just one of the Ebola vaccines in development - one designed by U.S. and Canadian government researchers with a company called New Link Genetics and licensed to Merck. It uses an animal virus called vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) to carry tiny pieces of the Ebola virus to help train the immune system to recognize it.

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http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebola-virus-outbreak/cdc-ready-vaccinate-6-000-against-ebola-sierra-leone-n308576

 In October, scientists set out to do something unprecedented – conduct a drugs trial during an epidemic to find a treatment for a lethal disease. Could they make history and change the way we deal with outbreaks?

THE GUARDIAN  by Sarah Boseley                           Feb, 17, 2015

In depth description of efforts by a group of Oxford University scientists to run field trials of drugs for use against Ebola.

" ...The little band of scientists had flown to Guinea on 16 October to do something that had never been successfully done before – set up a trial of experimental drugs against an infectious disease in the middle of an epidemic. Because the Ebola virus does not exist at low levels in any population, unless you run a properly conducted trial while the storm is raging, you will never have drugs that are proven to be effective. The Oxford team’s trial would not only aim to find a drug that worked against Ebola but also to establish a blueprint for the way drug trials would be run during outbreaks in the future. This did not just apply to fighting Ebola: if the scientists were successful, their trial would develop protocols for testing drugs for any epidemic, be it Sars or flu...."

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The company producing the new Ebola treatment for an FDA-approved test suddenly pulled out of Liberia, leaving researchers confused.

BUZZFEED                by Hayes Brown                                                                               Feb. 13, 2015

...An FDA-approved trial of the drug brincidofovir, meant to treat rather than prevent Ebola, had already begun in Liberia’s capital of Monrovia when Chimerix, the company that produced the drug, pulled out of the trial at the end of January. The clinical trial partners decided to end the trial on Feb. 3.

Peter Horby, who led the University of Oxford research team conducting the study, called the drug company’s decision “a bit abrupt.”

A woman is injected by a health care worker as she takes part in an Ebola virus vaccine trial in Monrovia Abbas Dulleh / Via AP

REUTERS   by Sharon Begley                                                                                      Feb. 10, 2015

NEW YORK --An experimental Ebola drug from Sarepta Therapeutics Inc protected six of eight lab monkeys injected with the virus, scientists from the company and the U.S. Army reported on Tuesday.

The drug, called AVI-7537, joins ZMapp from Mapp Biopharmaceutical and a compound from Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corp as the agents shown to cure non-human primates given otherwise-lethal injections of Ebola virus.

The ZMapp and Tekmira drugs protected 100 percent of lab monkeys in studies, giving them a possible edge. But, unlike those, Sarepta's drug has been formally tested in healthy human volunteers at high doses and caused no serious side effects.

Sarepta's $300 million contract with the U.S. Department of Defense to develop drugs against Ebola and the related Marburg virus ended in 2012 due to government funding cuts. The study was completed just before then but not published until the current Ebola outbreak increased interest in the drug....