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Tag: ebola vaccine
Ebola Virus Vaccine Developed By Bird Flu Scientist

Ebola Virus Vaccine Developed By Bird Flu Scientist

By Karen Herzog, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (TNS)

Another vaccine has joined the race against the often fatal Ebola virus, and this one was developed by a group led by a University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist internationally known for his bird flu research.

The whole virus vaccine that Yoshihiro Kawaoka and his colleagues developed was constructed using a novel experimental platform, and it has been shown to effectively protect monkeys exposed to the Ebola virus at a top biosafety-level National Institutes of Health laboratory in Montana, according to an article published Thursday in the prominent journal Science.

This vaccine differs from other Ebola vaccines in development because, as an inactivated whole virus vaccine, it can prime the host immune system with the complete range of Ebola viral proteins and genes, which makes it more likely to trigger a robust immune response, according to a news release from UW-Madison.

“In terms of efficacy, this affords excellent protection,” said Kawaoka, a professor of pathobiological sciences in the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine who has been working on the Ebola vaccine for years, and also holds a faculty appointment at the University of Tokyo.

There are no proven treatments for Ebola or vaccines to prevent individuals from becoming infected. Ebola, previously known as Ebola hemorrhagic fever, is a rare and deadly disease first discovered in 1976 near the Ebola River in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Ebola has claimed more than 10,000 lives in a current outbreak in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Symptoms include fever, severe headache, muscle pain, fatigue, diarrhea, vomiting, stomach pain, and unexplained bleeding or bruising.

Whole virus vaccines have long been used to successfully prevent such serious diseases as polio, hepatitis, and human papillomavirus-mediated cervical cancer.

The vaccine developed by Kawaoka’s group does not yet have the backing of a manufacturer, and has not been tested in people. Human trials are expensive and complex, costing millions of dollars.

Four other Ebola vaccines in development recently advanced to the clinical trial stage in humans.

An efficacy trial for an Ebola vaccine developed by the Public Health Agency of Canada launched Wednesday in a community in Guinea where Ebola spread. About 10,000 people are expected to receive that vaccine, which reportedly has shown positive results in smaller safety trials and is backed by NewLink Genetics and Merck.

Kawaoka said the experimental platforms on which the four other vaccines were developed have drawbacks in terms of safety and delivery.

The vaccine with UW-Madison ties was constructed on an experimental platform first devised in 2008 by Peter Halfmann, a research scientist in Kawaoka’s lab.

That experimental platform allows researchers to safely work with the virus because a key gene is deleted, according to the Science report describing the vaccine’s development. The Ebola virus uses that gene, known as VP30, to make a protein required for it to reproduce in host cells. Like most viruses, Ebola depends on host cells to grow and become infectious.

By engineering monkey kidney cells to express the deleted VP30 protein, the virus could be safely studied in the lab and be used as a basis for devising a whole virus vaccine. The vaccine also was chemically inactivated using hydrogen peroxide, the Science report noted.

Early attempts to devise an inactivated whole virus Ebola vaccine through irradiation and the preservative formalin failed to protect monkeys exposed to the Ebola virus and were abandoned, according to Kawaoka.

The Ebola vaccine study conducted by Kawaoka’s group was supported by the National Institutes of Health and Japanese Health and Labor Sciences Research Grants.

(c)2015 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo: AFP Photo/Zoom Dosso

NIH Director Says U.S. Likely To Spend A Billion On Ebola Fight In Coming Months

NIH Director Says U.S. Likely To Spend A Billion On Ebola Fight In Coming Months

By Sandi Doughton, The Seattle Times

SEATTLE — Over the next few months, the United States will probably spend a billion dollars responding to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the director of the National Institutes of Health said in Seattle on Wednesday.

Factor in the amount being invested by other nations, and “it’s going to be an enormous number,” Dr. Francis Collins said at a Gates Foundation conference.

But much of that expense could have been avoided had the U.S. and others provided adequate funding to push forward the development of Ebola vaccines and drugs that have been languishing for years, Collins said.

“If one wants to be prepared, it costs money to do so,” he said. “We have been shortchanging that for the past decade, at least in the U.S.”

Collins was part of a panel on Ebola added to an event commemorating the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges program of innovative health research. The foundation has pledged $50 million to help fight the Ebola epidemic, in which nearly 3,900 people have died and more than 8,000 have been sickened across Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

While much of that money is going to bolster the on-the-ground response, the foundation is also working to accelerate progress on treatments and vaccines, said Chris Karp, vaccine-team leader for the philanthropy.

Gates is funding efforts to step up production of ZMapp, a promising drug that protected monkeys from Ebola even days after the animals were infected. The drug was administered to a handful of people infected recently, including two American aid workers. They survived, but others who got the drug did not — so it’s still unclear how well it works in humans.

But the current method of producing the drug in tobacco plants is slow, Karp said. Gates provided money to explore large-scale production methods.

The foundation is also funding work on the use of the immune-booster immunoglobulin as a treatment for Ebola, and on methods to isolate and mass produce antibodies that target the virus, including antibodies from people who survived infection.

The World Health Organization is fast-tracking preliminary human trials on two promising vaccines, compressing a process that normally takes four to five years into a few months, said WHO’s Vasee Moorthy.

In collaboration with the British charity Wellcome Trust, the Gates Foundation is assisting in that effort, too, paying for production of the vaccine used in the trials.

An audience member asked why the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, which owns one of the vaccines, doesn’t pay for the production itself so the charities could spend more of their money in the affected countries.

David Vaughn, the GlaxoSmithKline representative on the panel, sidestepped the question, pointing out the need for multiple partners to fund such an ambitious endeavor.

Vaughn said nine trials could be under way before the end of this year. GlaxoSmithKline is also exploring the unprecedented step of conducting preliminary and advanced trials simultaneously, to more quickly determine if the vaccine is safe and effective.

A British expert who has been modeling the spread of Ebola, said he doubts the drugs or vaccines will be ready in time to have much impact on the current outbreak. The way to bring the virus under control is through the standard tools of public health, such as isolating infected people and tracing their contacts, said Neil Ferguson, of Imperial College, London.

But in countries with threadbare health systems, even those basic measures have been difficult.

The epidemic appears to have leveled off in Guinea, where it was detected early, Ferguson said. But in Sierra Leone, where there was virtually no system to spot and track infections, it continues to build.

The one technological tool that could make a difference now would be a quick way to diagnose the disease, Ferguson added.

The Gates Foundation is working on that, too, Karp said. But, despite his affiliation with a tech-oriented organization, Karp agreed that the immediate answer isn’t new drugs or devices. “The fundamental barriers are not technical,” he said. “They’re systems. They’re resources.”

AFP Photo/Mike Stone

Ebola Vaccine Effective In Tests On Monkeys

Ebola Vaccine Effective In Tests On Monkeys

By Lauren Raab, Melissa Healy, and Matt Pearce, Los Angeles Times

Tests of an experimental Ebola vaccine have shown positive results, protecting healthy monkeys from the virus, the National Institutes of Health announced Sunday, as West Africa grapples with an epidemic that has killed about 2,000 people.

Researchers gave four macaque monkeys a shot of the experimental vaccine, called ChAd3, and exposed them to high levels of the Ebola virus five weeks later. All the monkeys were protected, the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said.

The protection decreased over time, however: Ten months after receiving the vaccine, just two of the four were protected.

Researchers also tried giving monkeys the experimental vaccine and then, eight weeks later, a booster vaccine. Ten months after the initial dose, all four monkeys were fully protected, the institute said.

The authors of the latest study, published Sunday in the journal Nature Medicine, suggested that without the booster, the Ebola virus can quickly regain a foothold and attack the immune system.

Human safety trials of the ChAd3 vaccine were scheduled to start last week in Bethesda, Md., with preliminary results due by the end of 2014. In the current crisis, American officials overseeing the trials suggested that the availability of a tested vaccine would offer some assurance of protection to health-care workers wary of going to West Africa.

The experimental vaccine was developed by the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. The research team was led by Nancy J. Sullivan of the NIH and included scientists from Okairos, a biotechnology company that is now part of GlaxoSmithKline, and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.

Separately, an Ebola-infected American doctor being treated in Nebraska has shown improvement but is still very ill, his wife said.

Dr. Rick Sacra, 51, an obstetrician who lives in the Boston area, contracted the deadly virus while treating patients in Liberia as part of a missionary program. He was flown to the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha on Friday.

This year’s Ebola outbreak is the worst on record, with a fatality rate of 53 percent, according to the World Health Organization.

Rick Sacra is the third American to be transported to the United States this year after contracting the virus.

Nancy Writebol and Dr. Kent Brantly, who were also missionaries in Liberia, recovered after treatment at a special infectious-disease unit at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. Writebol and Brantly received an experimental medication, ZMapp, but it is unclear whether that helped them.

In all, seven Ebola patients received ZMapp. Five were later released from hospitals; the other two did not survive. The company that developed the drug, Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc. of San Diego, says it has no doses left. Making it is time-consuming, but the U.S. is trying to help the company speed up the process.

There is no cure or approved vaccine for Ebola, which triggers hemorrhaging and is transmitted through contact with the bodily fluids of those infected. The latest outbreak was first detected in Guinea in March and has since affected Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Senegal, where at least one patient has been identified.

Times staff writer Alexandra Zavis contributed to this report.

AFP Photo/Zoom Dosso

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