AMERICAN health officials have agreed to consider allowing Nigeria to test an anti-ebola trial drug jointly developed by developed by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and GlaxoSmithKline.
Since the outbreak of the ebola virus disease (EVD), five people have died from it in Nigeria, prompting health minister Professor Onyebuchi Chukwu to write to US health officials asking them for urgent assistance.US National Institute of Health (NIH) finally agreed to start trials of the drug which it will share with Nigeria , followed by similar tests in Gambia and Mali in mid September.
Trials in the US will begin with 20 volunteers to see if the virus is safe for use on humans. These new trials come after Mapp Biopharmaceuticals reported that its trial drug Zmapp has proved very successful after it was tested on 18 laboratory monkeys, with all of them recovering after being treated with it.
An NIH spokesman said: “The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has initiated discussions with ministry of health officials in Nigeria about the prospects for conducting a Phase One safety study of the vaccine among healthy adults in that country. The pace of human safety testing for experimental ebola vaccines has been expedited in response to the ongoing virus outbreak in West Africa.”
“Initial human testing of an investigational vaccine to prevent EVD will begin next week by the National NIAID, part of the NIH. The early-stage trial will begin initial human testing of a vaccine co-developed by NIAID and GlaxoSmithKline and will evaluate the experimental vaccine’s safety and ability to generate an immune system response in healthy adults, with testing will taking place at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.”
These tests will involve a mixture that uses both the current Zaire strain and another strain, Sudan, while in the second week of September, NIH and a British team will test that vaccine on 100 volunteers in the United Kingdom. According to the NIH, these trials are conducted on healthy adults who are not infected with the ebola virus to determine if the vaccine is safe and induces an adequate immune response.
NIAID director, Anthony Fauci, said: “There is an urgent need for a protective ebola vaccine and it is important to establish that a vaccine is safe and spurs the immune system to react in a way necessary to protect against infection. We know the best way to prevent the spread of ebola infection is through public health measures, including good infection control practices, isolation, contact tracing, quarantine, and provision of personal protective equipment but a vaccine will ultimately be an important tool in the prevention effort. ”
Trials of Zmapp are also expected to continue as although, two US aid workers who contracted ebola in Liberia were cured after receiving it, their physicians do not know if the drug helped. One Liberian doctor who contacted ebola died on Monday despite being given the drug, as did a Spanish priest.
