GSK Joins Consortium To Further Ebola Vaccine Development

GlaxoSmithKline announced that it has joined an EU consortium with three other research institutions in order to further advance the development of GSK’s vaccine against the deadly virus Ebola.

The company’s vaccine candidate against Ebola is made up of a single Ebola virus protein which belongs to the devastating Zaire strain making rounds in West Africa. The virus does not carry infectious viral material and therefore cannot make a person sick with Ebola, but instead works to generate immune responses against the virus. It is currently being developed in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with a target deadline of 2015. The vaccine is also presently undergoing trial in 120 healthy volunteers as well as in other Phase 1 studies. Early stage trials for a companion booster vaccination are also underway at the University of Oxford.

Aside from GSK, the consortium is comprised of the University of Oxford, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois in Lausanne, and the Bernhard-Nocht Institute. The European Commission Directorate General for Research and Innovation has committed funding of €15.1 million under its Horizon 2020 program in order to support research into developing treatments and vaccines for Ebola. The consortium also anticipates an additional €1.4 million in funding from the Swiss government.

Dr. Moncef Slaoui, Chairman of GSK Vaccines, said, “We welcome the generous support from the European Commission and appreciate how quickly they have worked to secure the research grant for our work. These partnerships are essential to accelerate development of the vaccine candidate in response to the Ebola outbreak we are seeing in West Africa.” GSK said it needs to determine the timeline for making near-term supplies of the Ebola vaccine candidate available in order to administer vaccination to health care works and other people at high risk of infection in the affected areas.

If the vaccine demonstrates positive safety and immunogenicity data, GSK said it will be able to advance the candidate into larger Phase 2 trials in Africa as early as January of next year, thanks to the funding from the European Commission.