New Ebola trial in West Africa to evaluate three different vaccine strategies

A coalition of international health institutes and organizations will soon be launching a large clinical trial of Ebola vaccine candidates to identify proper regimens that could prevent a future outbreak of the deadly disease.

The French National Institute of Health and Medicine Research (Inserm), the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) will conduct the trial in collaboration with health authorities in Guinea and Liberia under the purview of the Partnership for Research on Ebola Vaccination (PREVAC).

The organizations are seeking to enroll approximately 5,000 adults and children living in West African countries that experienced an Ebola outbreak between 2014 and 2016. The trial will compared three experimental vaccine strategies, which will be conducted in two stages.

During the first stage, authorities will administer a prime-boost vaccination combining two different vaccines — one manufactured by Janssen and the other by Bavarian Nordic — compared with a placebo regimen.

In the second stage, authorities will compare the vaccines used in the first stage with two different regimens, involving an experimental vaccine manufactured by Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. The first regimen involves an initial dose of the vaccine followed by a booster dose at eight weeks while the second involves a placebo dose after eight weeks.

According to Yves Levy, Inserm chairman and CEO; Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at NIH; and Peter Piot, LSHTM director, the international research partnership was designed and launched to answer remaining questions regarding the safety and immunogenicity of candidate Ebola vaccine strategies to enable them to better fight future Ebola outbreaks.