Here’s How the Ebola Vaccine Trial Is Doing

TIME MAGAZINE By Alexandra Sifferlin                          Nov. 25, 2014
 By  Alexandra Sifferlin                       

Scientists are scurrying to get their Ebola vaccines through the necessary safety trials before they can be used widely. That includes the University of Maryland School of Medicine, which recently kicked off the latest step in their research: figuring out the appropriate dosing for the vaccine that’s both effective and safe.

The University of Maryland is one of a handful of institutions involved in the testing of an experimental but promising vaccine developed by the National Institutes of Health’s Vaccine Research Center (VRC) and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). The hope is that the vaccine will pass through early trials needed by end of December so that the World Health Organization (WHO) and a panel of outside experts can decide whether to move on to a large efficacy trial, which would mean vaccinating a lot of people in West Africa to see how well it works.

The vaccine has already made it through safety trials conducted by the NIH, as well as trials at the University of Oxford and at Emory University. In the current trial, researchers at Maryland vaccinated 10 volunteers on Nov. 10th and 10 volunteers on Nov. 17th. The university has also vaccinated 80 people in Mali. The volunteers’ blood will be monitored for a year, but researchers are most interested in when the participants hit the 28-days post-vaccination mark. That’s when the body should be at its peak antibody response.

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http://time.com/3604899/ebola-vaccine-trial/