The Canadian Public Health Agency has offered to release thousands of vaccine dose of a made-in-Canada experimental Ebola virus vaccine known as VSV-EBOV to counter the wide spread virus. According to reuter report
NewLink Genetics Corp, which licensed an Ebola vaccine developed by Canadian government scientists, has enough doses on hand to launch the first human safety trial of an Ebola vaccine this summer, its chief executive said on Wednesday.
The company has also lined up two contract manufacturing companies and possibly a third and will be able to produce tens of thousands of vaccine doses within “the next month or two,” Dr Charles Link said in an interview.
The largest Ebola outbreak in history, which has killed more than 1,000 people in West Africa, has lent an unprecedented urgency to efforts to develop vaccines and treatments, which for years had largely languished.
Last week, the Ames, Iowa-based company’s wholly owned subsidiary, BioProtection Systems Corp, received $1 million from the United States Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) for more pre-clinical toxicology studies, including stepped-up manufacturing, to allow human trials to begin quickly. The vaccine was developed by scientists at the Public Health Agency of Canada.
“DTRA said, ‘we want this to move quickly,'” Link said. “Before that, I’d have said it would take eight to 10 months before we could launch human studies, but now it’s a matter of weeks.”
Only one treatment, made by Tekmira Pharmaceuticals, had even begun human safety trials, while the others had been tested only in non-human primates.
In addition to NewLink, pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline is awaiting approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to begin a human safety trial of an experimental vaccine, possibly as soon as next month.
The World Health Organization said on Tuesday that two experimental Ebola vaccines were set to enter clinical trials in the coming weeks and that there could be enough early-stage data to consider their emergency use late this year.
“There is a way to fast-track clinical trials,” WHO Assistant Director-General Marie-Paule Kieny said.
WHO’s interest has acted like a starter’s pistol in the race to get Ebola drugs or vaccines into the field. On Wednesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, wrote in an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine that “production scale-up” of ZMapp is under way but will take time.
ZMapp is the cocktail of antibodies, produced by Mapp Biopharmaceutical of San Diego, given to two American medical workers who contracted Ebola and were evacuated to Atlanta.
Also on Wednesday, Canada’s Tekmira Pharmaceuticals said it was discussing options for its experimental Ebola treatment with governments and other agencies, including the WHO.