NIH awards $112,000 grant to help advance proposed Ebola virus vaccine candidate

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently awarded a grant worth $112,000 to researchers at the John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM) at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa (UH) to expand its studies of a proposed Ebola virus disease (EVD) vaccine candidate.

According to UH, the vaccine candidate has already been proven effective in clinical animal studies.

“We are looking to see if our vaccine candidate can protect in other members in the filovirus family, viruses that are related to Ebola virus such as Marburg virus and Sudan virus,” Liana Medina, a PhD candidate at UH, said.

Medina said the research team would be looking into the types of antibodies produced in vaccinated animals and if those antibodies could prevent the virus from entering cells. Additionally, they will look at immune cells from animals that were protected against infection and those that weren’t to see if they could find differences that were related to protection.

“We would also like to see if using proteins from Ebola virus can protect against infection with closely related viruses,” Medina said.

Ebola virus disease is a viral hemorrhagic fever and is primarily spread between humans and from animals through bodily fluids. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the virus has a high mortality rate between 83 and 90 percent and is categorized as a Risk Group 4 Pathogen, requiring a biosafety level 4-equivalent containment for treating patients.