Scientists around the world are in a race against time to develop a vaccine against the Ebola virus as quickly as possible, which has already done more than 5000 dead. For their part, researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (United States) recently launched the last step of their research: determining the appropriate dosage for the vaccine to be both effective and safe.
The University of Maryland is one of a handful of institutions currently working for the US Immunization Research Center and the GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) laboratory. Their hope is that they can complete the first trials before the end of December so that the World Health Organization can decide to move on to a larger trial, which would mean vaccinating large numbers of people in West Africa. , to see how effective the vaccine is.
100 people already vaccinated
The vaccine has already gone through the safety testing stage carried out by US health authorities. Currently, researchers in Maryland have vaccinated 10 volunteers on November 10 (most of them from the University campus) and 10 volunteer caregivers on November 17. They also vaccinated 80 people in Mali. The blood of these volunteers will be monitored for a year. But what interests the researchers the most is to see what will be the reaction of the vaccinated people to the virus, 28 days after the vaccine, because that is when there is a spike in the immune response.
“In an ideal world, if we were not in the midst of an epidemic, we would offer to do a vaccine and a booster, in order to have 100% effective coverage against the virus. But during an epidemic, the essential is to protect people during the epidemic, “says Dr Kirsten Lyke, who is leading this research. “That probably won’t be enough for long-term protection. But what we’re looking for is that they can slip through the cracks of the Ebola epidemic.”
It is still early to conclude that the vaccine is perfectly safe, but so far no side effects have been felt by the volunteers apart from a slight fever.
