Researchers face big hurdles in testing Ebola vaccines

USA TODAY  by Liz Sazbo                                                                                  Feb. 17, 2015
The unpredictable Ebola outbreak in West Africa is thwarting health officials' best efforts both to contain the epidemic, as well as test new treatments and vaccines.

Biologist Olivier Mbaya works with serum samples from healthy volunteer participants in a European study of an experimental Ebola vaccine,, at the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2015. (Photo: Cliff Owen, AP)

The number of new Ebola cases has risen sharply in the West African nation of Guinea, for example, even as researchers wonder if there will be enough patients in neighboring Liberia to test experimental vaccines.

Just a few weeks ago, the number of new Ebola cases was falling in all three West African countries....

Cases have declined so sharply that North Carolina drug developer Chimerix canceled a clinical trial of the antiviral brincidofovir, which was given to several American Ebola patients but which has never been formally tested against the disease.The dwindling number of Ebola patients in Liberia is "welcome news," says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

Even if the trials produce no definitive conclusions, drug makers could still apply for approval from the Food and Drug Administration based on animal data, through a special program meant to speed the development of vaccines for the most dangerous and untreatable diseases.

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