Is it too late for an Ebola vaccine?

Doctor Craig Spencer came down with a fever shortly after returning from New York via Europe from Liberia, reminding the world that the disease is continuing to ravage west Africa.

Despite the World Health Organisation (WHO) having declared Nigeria and Senegal Ebola-free this week, Mali had its first confirmed case.

Funding for vaccines and agreements between drug companies were made this week with the goal of eventually stemming the disease.

Plans were laid out by the WHO today to speed up development of vaccines. At a meeting of drug industry executives and health experts in Geneva, WHO assistant directory Marie-Paule Kienytold said: “Before the end of first half of 2015…we could have available a few hundred thousand doses. That could be 200,000.”

But revelations were also made of a vaccine sat on the shelf untested, all due to an Ebola vaccine not being a commercial opportunity prior to this outbreak.

Funding from Europe

There is currently no vaccine, and development has been slow in the past because the commercial opportunity for such a vaccine was thought to be so small.

The WHO has said two vaccines are proving promising, and that it wants tests on them to be completed by December.

The European Commission pledged £80m earlier this week to help develop a vaccine as part of a partnership with drug companies.

Under the Innovative Medicine Initiative, drug companies will contribute the same amount, with the money largely being spent on trials for three experimental vaccines.

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Drugmakers team-up

But drug companies including GlaxoSmithKline want guarantees that if they are sued by people who use the vaccines, they will not lose millions.

“I think it is reasonable that there should be some level of indemnification because the vaccine is essentially being used in an emergency situation before we’ve all had the chance to confirm its absolute profile,” GlaxoSmithKline Chief Executive Andrew Witty told BBC radio.

Johnson & Johnson is one of the drugmakers now saying it could team up with GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer to help produce a million doses of an Ebola vaccine next year.

‘Too late’

GlaxoSmithKline is reported to have the most advanced vaccine, which will have some doses ready towards the end of this year.

But the drug company has said that while it is fast-tracking development, its vaccine will “come too late” for the current epidemic, since it usually takes as long 10 years, and the company is working on a time-scale of 12 months.

NewLink Genetics, in co-operation with the Canadian health agency, has begun human testing of its vaccine called VSV-EBOV, with results expected in December.

A decade ago Canadian and American scientists first produced the vaccine that proved 100 per cent effective in protecting monkeys against Ebola. But development on that vaccine stalled, and funding never came.

“It takes a crisis sometimes to get people talking. ‘OK, We’ve got to do something here.’ ” Thomas W. Geisbert, an Ebola expert at the University of Texas, told the New York Times.