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news.Scientists at Oxford University have started first booster Ebola vaccine trials to test its safety and evaluate its potential to further increase the immune responses seen in healthy volunteers.
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As part of an ongoing trial at the Jenner Institute at Oxford University, all the adult volunteers were earlier administered an experimental Ebola vaccine being developed by GSK and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Between 17 September and 18 November 2014, the Oxford University trial saw 60 people vaccinated with initial results expected before Christmas. The first GSK/NIH Ebola vaccine ‘prime’ uses a single Ebola virus gene in a chimpanzee adenovirus to generate an immune response.
Around 30 of the volunteers will now receive a second candidate Ebola vaccine ‘booster’ of a different type developed by Denmark-based Bavarian Nordic. This vaccine uses the same Ebola virus gene in a modified vaccinia Ankara (MVA) virus.
The new part of the Oxford trial will be funded under a grant from the Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the UK Department for International Development (DFID).
The latest trial will test the booster vaccine’s safety, given from three to ten weeks after the first, and will measure the immune responses seen in the volunteers over a period of six months.
Oxford University Jenner Institute professor Adrian Hill, who is leading the trial, said: "The aim of this trial is to tell us something about the safety of these two Ebola vaccines used in combination, and whether the second booster vaccine can increase immune responses further.
"We have seen promising results from the first 20 people vaccinated with a multi-strain formulation in the USA – the vaccine is well tolerated and does generate an immune response. How long that response lasts, and what level of immune response we need to offer people protection from Ebola we don’t know as yet. It is only larger trials in West Africa that will begin to tell us that."
This approach of using two vaccines helps gather significant data about an initial immune response and the level of the body’s immune response further.
Following the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, several safety trials of the GSK/NIH vaccine candidate were fast-tracked in the US, the UK, Mali and Switzerland.