Oxford University’s Jenner Institute, led by Professor Adrian Hill, is to begin human trials of a potential vaccine against the Ebola virus.
The first round of trials should take place at the Oxford Vaccine Centre in Churchill Hospital in September, subject to approval, and involve 60 volunteers from the Oxford area. If these prove successful trials will be extended to volunteers in the Gambia and Mali to account for potential differences between European and West African responses.
There is no risk of volunteers becoming infected with Ebola themselves, as Professor Hill explains, “The vaccine takes a gene from Ebola and puts in it a virus carrier. The carrier happens to be a safe version of a common cold virus.”
The trials have received accelerated funding due to the current Ebola epidemic, which has killed more than 1,500 people at the time of writing. The Jenner Institute is working in tandem with GlaxoSmithKline and the US government’s National Institute of Health.
Professor Hill also emphasised the urgency of their work, saying, “In terms of developing a clinical trial programme this is happening faster than anything I have come across. Vaccines can take a decade to develop but we want to develop something within about six months. If 10 people are infected with Ebola then between five and nine of them will die.”
There is currently no treatment for the disease itself, only its symptoms, and although an experimental drug called ZMapp appears to have been used successfully in a number of cases, supplies of it are extremely limited.
