It's not in the news as much, but the Ebola outbreak is still an ongoing struggle in parts of West Africa. In response many groups around the world are attempting to rush research on a potential vaccine. When it comes to medical research you want to rush in terms of doing it quickly, and not rush as in skip steps.
Toward that goal, researchers in China just finished a phase 1 clinical trial for a new Ebola vaccine. (via ScienceAlert) If you're unfamiliar with the clinical trial system, phase 1 is meant to only test safety and response to certain doses, and not the effectiveness of whatever is being tested. 120 healthy adults were involved in the double-blind study, and assigned to either a placebo, low-dose, or high-dose group.
Although this trial was only meant to analyze safety, the researchers still monitored their response to the vaccine. In a promising results, everybody in the high-dose group and 38 people in the low-dose group showed an immune response. Those in the high-dose group produce more antibodies, and as Science Daily reports, showed symptoms of mild fever and vomiting.
However, along with some soreness around the injection site, this is seen as a benign side effect in response to the vaccine. The immune response is also encouraging because some had concerns that the viral vector used may not work. The vaccine was constructed from a modified adenovirus, which is used in other types of vaccines. The worry was that potential previous exposure to other adenovirus-based vaccines would render this Ebola vaccine inert. It's still preliminary, but this trial shows that increasing the dose seems to alleviate this issue.
Another reason that this trial is extremely important is that it is the first vaccine based off the Ebola strain from the 2014 outbreak. Other vaccine research is based off of a strain from a 1976 outbreak, and may not be as effective even if fully developed. Despite all of this good news there is still a long road ahead for this potential vaccine.
The hope is to do the next phase of trials, actually testing the effectiveness of the vaccine, in Africa. Previous research has shown that this type of vaccine can actually increase a person's susceptibility to HIV infection. As development continues, this is an issue the researchers will need to address, but they are encouraged by these initial results.
