Experts Share Their Hopes for Ebola Vaccine

19 April, 2016

Ebola vaccine trial team follows-up with a vaccine trial participant, Katongourou, Guinea. Courtesy of WHO/S. Hawkey

The World Health Organization (WHO), partners and affected countries are stepping up planning for how to use an Ebola vaccine in response to an outbreak. The Ebola outbreak that struck Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone in 2014 prompted the search, on an exceptionally accelerated schedule, for a vaccine to prevent the disease. Although there has been more than one promising candidate, the vesicular stomatitis virus-ebola virus (VSV-EBOV) vaccine was selected based on an algorithm produced by the WHO Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee on Ebola Experimental Interventions for the critical Phase III trial in Guinea and Sierra Leone. The committee considered various parameters, including efficacy in non-human primates the ability to provoke an immune response in humans in the early days after vaccination, and availability.

In this article, three experts from WHO, the Sierra Leone Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) comment on the future of the VSV-EBOV vaccine:

see more at: http://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/news/2016/04/experts-share-their-hopes-for-ebola-vaccine.aspx