European Commission supports new Ebola vaccine consortium

A new international consortium, backed by the European Commission, has been launched to help advance research in to a candidate vaccine against Ebola.

Developmental efforts will focus on a vaccine that is being co-developed by GSK and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). The new research group comprise the multinational drugs company and research partners from UK’s University of Oxford, the University Hospital of Lausanne, Switzerland, and the Bernhard-Nocht Institute in Germany. The consortium is receiving €15.1m of funding from DG Research and Innovation in European Commission as part of Horizon 2020; the Swiss Government is also expected to contribute €1.4m.

Commenting on the new consortium, 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.”

The funding is already helping to implement an on-going trial of an Ebola candidate vaccine being carried out in 120 healthy adult volunteers in Lausanne. If the safety and immunogenicity data from this and other on-going phase 1 trials is judged as encouraging, the EU funding will enable the consortium to begin larger phase 2 trials in Africa, which could start as early as January 2015. These trials will evaluate the safety and ability of the GSK-NIH vaccine candidate to create an immune response against Ebola. A booster vaccine could also be tested if early stage trials at the University of Oxford are successful.