MRC and DfID contribution to jointly funded rapid response strategic award.

A clinical trial in the UK and West Africa will test a single-shot Ebola vaccine in humans for the first time, aiming to determine whether it is safe and triggers an immune response. The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa had spread from Guinea to multiple countries, and the World Health Organization had declared it an international public health emergency. No licensed vaccine or specific treatment existed for Ebola at that point. This trial was designed to fill that gap by rapidly evaluating a monovalent vectored Ebola vaccine—a vaccine built from a harmless virus carrying an Ebola gene—in parallel with collaborators at the US National Institutes of Health. If the vaccine proves safe and immunogenic, the World Health Organization could deploy it in affected regions as early as 2015. Successful deployment would give healthcare workers and outbreak responders a tool to contain future Ebola flare-ups, potentially saving lives and preventing the kind of widespread transmission seen in 2014. The trial’s parallel design—testing in both the UK and West Africa—also ensures that results apply to the populations most in need.