A Dowsett, Health Protection Agency / Science Photo Library
Until now, all Ebola virus vaccines have been based on a strain from the Zaire outbreak in 1976, which shares 97.6% similarity with the 2014 west African strain. Taking a new approach, Chinese researchers have developed a recombinant adenovirus type-5 vector-based Ebola vaccine that expresses the envelope glycoprotein from the 2014 epidemic strain.
Two doses of the novel vaccine were evaluated in a randomised, double-blind, phase I study involving 120 healthy adults. The higher dose was safe and “robustly immunogenic” with a 100% response rate and no serious adverse events, the researchers report in The Lancet
[1]
(online, 24 March 2015).
The vaccine will now be evaluated in a phase II trial in outbreak regions.
References
[1] Zhu F-C, Hou L-H, Li J-X et al. Safety and immunogenicity of a novel recombinant adenovirus type-5 vector-based Ebola vaccine in healthy adults in China: preliminary report of a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, phase 1 trial. The Lancet 2015. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(15)60553-0.
