WHO-led study shows Canadian-made Ebola vaccine protects against dreaded disease
It appears the world finally has an effective Ebola vaccine.
A new study reported Friday that a vaccine designed by scientists working at Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg induces a quick and highly effective response, protecting 100 per cent of the people who got it against the virus.
This is the first time an experimental Ebola vaccine has been shown to prevent people from becoming infected with the deadly disease.
The former director of the Winnipeg lab, Dr. Frank Plummer, was ecstatic about the news.
“I think it’s fantastic. For the NML and the whole team that was involved in this, it’s the culmination of 15 years of work. It’s very, very exciting. Very, very gratifying,” said Plummer, who led the lab when the work was being done.
His excitement was shared by the scientist who headed the project to develop the vaccine, Dr. Heinz Feldmann, who struggled for years to try to find a way to prove that the vaccine would work as well in people as it does in non-human primates.
“It’s the day we were waiting for. And to be honest I wasn’t sure if I ever would have ex- pected this to happen during my active (career) time. But it’s a great day to see this results coming out after all that work,” said Feldmann, who left Winnipeg in 2008 to head a laboratory at the National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana.
There had been high hopes that this vaccine, called Rvs V ZE BOV, would be effective if given the chance to prove itself.
And the data from this trial, conducted in Guinea, are persuasive, suggested Dr. Marie-Paule Kieny, a senior author of the trial and the World Health Organization’s point person for development of Ebola drugs.
“It suggests it works, it works pretty quickly, and it works well,” Kieny said.
Experts caution the 100 per cent protection rate will probably come down when the vaccine is used in more people. But the initial findings have created a lot of hope that the world will finally have a tool with which to fight Ebola outbreaks.
“It’s not so often in medical research or indeed in a career when you get something quite as important and game-changing as this,” said Dr. Jeremy Farrar, who heads Britain’s Wellcome Trust charity. The trust was a major sponsor of the trial.
The findings are reported in the medical journal The Lancet.
The study was actually meant to continue for a longer time, but an interim analysis conducted by the trial’s data and safety monitoring board this month concluded the vaccine was working.
The board of outside experts advised the researchers to stop using a control group and offer vaccine going forward to all the people who met the criteria for the study.
The study was led by the WHO and involved a variety of partners including the governments of Guinea and Norway, the Public Health Agency of Canada, Medicins Sans Frontieres and Wellcome.