The World Health Organisation (WHO) has welcomed the approval by Swissmedic for a trial with an experimental Ebola vaccine at the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV).
The United Nations Information Centre (UNIC) said in Lagos, Tuesday, the development marked the latest step towards bringing safe and effective Ebola vaccines for testing and implementation as quickly as possible.
It quoted Marie-Paule Kieny, Assistant Director General for Health Systems and Innovation at WHO, as saying that the approval meant that the vaccine could be used on approximately 120 individuals in Lausanne.
The trial, which is receiving support from WHO, Kieny stressed, was the latest in a series of trials going on in Mali, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Kieny said: “The vaccine is based on a genetically modified chimpanzee adenovirus (“ChAd-Ebola”; Chimpanzee-Adenovirus chAD3-ZEBOV).
“The trial will test the safety of the vaccine and its capacity to induce an immune response.
“Results from the CHUV trial will, together with the results of other centres involved, provide the basis for planning subsequent trials involving several thousand participants, and for choosing vaccine dose-level for efficacy trials,” she said.
Developed by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and a pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline, the UN agency revealed that “the vaccine consists of a virus that is rendered harmless and used as genetic carrier for one Ebola protein.
“The application, submitted at the end of September 2014, was handled as a priority, given the dimensions of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.
