The BBC, and Others are reporting that GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) phase 1 trials of its Ebola Vaccine is indicating promising results:
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in America has just released the first trial data for the vaccine that GSK is working on in its laboratories in Italy and Belgium.
Twenty adults were tested and an immune response to Ebola was prompted in each of them. The vaccine was also "well tolerated" by each of the people tested.
From the International Business Times
Four weeks after the volunteers received the experimental drug, researchers tested their blood and found that they had produced anti-Ebola antibodies, a sign that the vaccine had worked. They also found that the drug caused volunteers to produce a T cell response, which also helps to fight off Ebola.
While two study participants did report a fever after they were vaccinated, this only lasted for a day; no other volunteers saw adverse effects.
The vaccine is expected to arrive late in 2015.
(Score: 1) by sigma on Thursday November 27 2014, @09:23AM
Ye ken, no whit ah mean, bu' aye dinnae think GlaxoSmithKline is frae Sco'land a' all!
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday November 27 2014, @10:02AM
Thanks - I had just spotted that error as well! Corrected now, which means your comment will look out of place, but this comment might help. (Wanders away whistling 'Flower o' Scotland')
(Score: 2) by ticho on Thursday November 27 2014, @09:23AM
Good news, everyone! We will soon have a shipment to Africa to deliver!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 27 2014, @09:25AM
You McNasties are something else.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 27 2014, @09:31AM
Praise the Lord Obama for deliverance from the White Plague! On behalf of yo Homies all deez Ebola Niggas!!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 27 2014, @11:34AM
It's amazing how quickly the pharmaceutical industry can come up with these drugs, once a few rich white people get infected.
(Score: 4, Funny) by cafebabe on Thursday November 27 2014, @11:42AM
Does that mean 50 white people got Ebola [theonion.com]?
1702845791×2
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 27 2014, @01:16PM
It's amazing how none of the 1.1 billion people and 50-plus nations in Africa put any effort into researching a drug like this for an African problem that mainly affects Africans.
(Score: 1) by monster on Thursday November 27 2014, @03:32PM
...Or maybe, GlaxoSmithKline had a prototype all this time but didn't try it until there was somebody willing to pay enough for it.
(Score: 1) by monster on Thursday November 27 2014, @03:35PM
There was a </conspiration> tag at the end of this post. I don't know why it disappeared.
Now I found why! When previewing, the html entities got changed into real symbols and so the "tag" got filtered.
(Score: 2) by cykros on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:44PM
It was actually the secret cabal of gnomes that stole it as part of their secret plan to make a secret doomsday device.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 27 2014, @03:40PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 27 2014, @08:01PM
> There's no physical law that mandates only GlaxoSmithKline can research treatments for Ebola.
However there is a physical law that says organizations with equipment, expertise and other applicable resources already in place have a much lower bar to doing effective research. We can't all be randian ubermen with perfect knowledge and no real-world constraints like yourself.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday November 27 2014, @10:24PM
There's no physical law that mandates only GlaxoSmithKline can research treatments for Ebola.
But there are plenty of physical barriers and financial "laws" in play.
The number of people who can do this work is vanishingly small compared to the job at hand, and they are all employed on other projects, from which they have to be extracted, brought up to speed and retrained. One does not find out-of-work competent molecular biologists that that you can toss into a lab with one of the most deadly strains in the world. Nor does the world have a surplus of BSL 3 labs laying around unused.
Those that like to cheap shot the facts, and make racial conspiracies out of whole cloth very likely can't come up with a receipt for even a single euro that they donated to any third world disease research project.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 27 2014, @03:33PM
It's amazing how quickly the pharmaceutical industry can come up with these drugs, once a few rich white people get infected.
What's going on is that this outbreak of Ebola has infected and killed several times more people than all other known outbreaks [cdc.gov] of Ebola since the disease was first discovered almost forty years ago. So why should the pharmaceutic industry devote massive amounts of resources to a disease that kills a few hundred of people in remote African villages every few years and which up to this year was successfully contained each time it occurred?
Despite that, Ebola has been a subject of research since it was first discovered.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Joe on Thursday November 27 2014, @04:41PM
No, it is not amazing in the sense that you think.
Prior to the start of 2014, there has been over $400 million dollars* that has been distributed to researchers in the USA for projects that are relevant to Ebola.
It is amazing that science has come so far that we can manipulate completely different viruses, force them to produce antigens from another virus, and ensure that it can be put into people and elicit the correct type of immune response that is needed to protect from death. Science is amazing and I personally appreciate the fact that taxpayers cover the bill for most basic research even when it is unclear how it will have any direct societal benefit.
* A very quick and rough estimate made by searching "Ebola" using both the NIH (http://projectreporter.nih.gov/reporter.cfm) and NSF (http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/) grant search websites. This is also a vast underestimate of the real cost since all Ebola research is built upon basic research in molecular, cellular biology, virology, etc.
- Joe
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday November 27 2014, @10:09PM
One thing stripped from the post by the editors was that the last sentence read something like:
The vaccine is expected to arrive late in 2015, just in time to see the credit scroll of the horror show that is Ebola
The point is that by late 2015 the epidemic will probably be winding down anyway, as health workers get a handle on early detection, early isolation [nature.com], and better prevention via grass roots education.
The arrival of a vaccine will probably be too late to do much but prevent small flare-ups in remote villages, and perhaps ward off some future outbreak. However, it is not clear there will be enough to do that, and at best it might offer some protection to health workers.
The 400 million, (pretty much a drop in the bucket) hadn't yielded all that much. The work served mostly to identify the strains involved genetically, and also to flesh out the documentation of past infections.
Most of these new vaccines (the GSK isn't the only one) were able to build off of the genetic profiles, but most of this work was done since the outbreak ramped up in early 2014.
Still it is an amazing story to get any vaccine out this early, and in spite of all the political posturing that passes for informed commentary here on SN, GSK and others are pretty much footing the research bill for these projects. Do they expect to make money down the road, sure. I've no problem with that.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 28 2014, @03:42AM
The point is that by late 2015 the epidemic will probably be winding down anyway, as health workers get a handle on early detection, early isolation, and better prevention via grass roots education.
The key word there is "probably". The problem currently is that we still have exponential growth (though at a slower rate of growth) in two of the three hard-hit countries, Liberia and Sierra Leone. I hope we're within a few weeks of reaching a peak, but if it isn't reversed within a few months, then IMHO it'll be more likely that there's a massive surge of Ebola infected refugees from one or more of these countries. In that case, it'll be good to have something to slow the spread of the disease (particularly among medical personnel).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Snotnose on Thursday November 27 2014, @03:03PM
is if they find out 3-4 years down the road that the vaccine has nasty side effects. There's a reason they do multi-year, double blind studies on these things.
Can we expect to see panic and a rush to develop an Ebola vaccine cure in 5 years?
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday November 27 2014, @03:35PM
I take your point, but the side effects would have to be *really* nasty to be worse than a widespread Ebola pandemic, which is what this vaccine has the potential to prevent.
Also, while biology is complicated and medicine is hard and unexpected things can and do happen, I think (IANAD) vaccines of these types are pretty well understood and behave in predictable ways, even if this particular one is new. That may be one of the reasons they are prepared to allow shortcuts in this particular case. You expose the body to something that looks like your target illness, your body responds by developing defences against that threat. That's it. The vaccine payload itself is out of your system pretty quickly, and the rest is just your own body doing its work as it should. Long term side effects are generally non-existent. You're working with the body's own systems at a high level, rather than trying to directly modify/ circumvent/ brute-force low-level biochemistry/ machinery with drugs or surgery.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 27 2014, @05:15PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody-dependent_enhancement [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_antigenic_sin [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 27 2014, @06:56PM
The first one would be apparent in a short time-frame.
The second one could possibly show up in a future outbreak, but it would only be limited to the specific antigens used in the vaccine (there are plenty of others that the virus has).
An autoimmune disease triggered by exposure to the viral antigens could take a while to manifest.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday November 27 2014, @08:39PM
is if they find out 3-4 years down the road that the vaccine has nasty side effects. There's a reason they do multi-year, double blind studies on these things.
Can we expect to see panic and a rush to develop an Ebola vaccine cure in 5 years?
You sound a little like Jenny McCarthy [nypost.com].
The point here is that ebola is deadly. Those countries most heavily affected are suspected of under-reporting infections by as much as 60 percent. Infections discovered and isolated quickly prevent further spread. Infections prevented stops the epidemic in its tracks.
Every person vaccinated could prevent multiple deaths, not JUST the death of the infected person.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.