Vaccines

REUTERS by Kate Kelland                                     Jan. 23, 2015

LONDON-- The first batch of GlaxoSmithKline's experimental Ebola vaccine has been shipped to West Africa and is expected to arrive in Liberia later on Friday, the British drugmaker said.

The shipment, of an initial 300 vials of the vaccine, will be the first to arrive in one of the three main Ebola-affected African countries, GSK said in a statement.

It will be used in the first large-scale vaccine trials in coming weeks, in which healthcare workers helping to care for Ebola patients will be among the first to get it...

The vaccine, co-developed by the National Institutes of Health in the United States and Okairos, a biotechnology firm acquired by GSK in 2013, is currently being tested in five small phase I safety trials in Britain, the United States, Switzerland and Mali involving around 200 healthy volunteers in total.

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http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/01/23/uk-health-ebola-gsk-idUKKBN0KW0DU20150123

BALTIMORE SUN     by Scott Dance                                                   Jan. 20, 2015

In the year since Ebola began spreading across West Africa, the virus has mutated in more than 600 ways that change it slightly from versions studied in labs and used to develop treatments, according to researchers at Fort Detrick. And 10 of the mutations could make some drugs used to treat the virus ineffective, they wrote in research published Tuesday.

The "genomic drift," as the scientists called it, could make agents similar to the experimental drug ZMapp unable to bind to the virus anymore.

While the changes affect only a tiny fraction of Ebola's genome, they offer new lessons about the virus that might not have been learned because of the wide scope of the outbreak, larger than all others combined
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http://www.baltimoresun.com/health/bs-hs-ebola-mutation-20150120-story.html

BLOOMBERG       by  Matthew Hill                        Jan. 12, 2015                                    

At 4:50 a.m. at the Kasanka National Park in northern Zambia, tourists watch from a platform in a tree as the sound of millions of wings accompanies the sunrise.

Straw-coloured Fruit Bats fly in Kasanka National Park, Zambia. Photographer: Fabian von Poser/Getty Images

CENTER FOR INFECTIOUS DISEASE AND POLICY RESEARCH     by Lisa Schnirring                                 Jan. 9, 2015

The next steps in testing Ebola vaccines as well as a picture of how they might be used in West Africa's outbreak region became clearer today as officials from the World Health Organization (WHO) shared the outcome of yesterday's (Thursday's) high-level meeting in Geneva.

Large phase 3 trials in West Africa's outbreak setting will be next up to see if the vaccines work, with the studies designed to collect more safety data, a task usually covered in phase 2 trials, experts involved in the meeting said today at a WHO media telebriefing. However, as Ebola infections drop off in the outbreak region, scientists face a closing window of opportunity to see how the vaccines perform in a real-life setting.

Experts also signaled a possible role for two Ebola vaccine formulations: a single-dose vaccine providing shorter-term immunity that could be used to tamp down Ebola flare-ups and a prime-boost vaccine that may provide more durable immunity and could be used for other immunization strategies.