WHO: More doses of Ebola vaccines available soon

GENEVA -- The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday it expected to begin small-scale use of two experimental Ebola vaccines in West Africa early next year and in the meantime, transfusions of survivors' blood may offer the best hope of treatment.

WHO is working with pharmaceutical companies and regulators to accelerate the use of a range of potential treatments to fight the disease, which has no cure. The current Ebola outbreak has killed 3,091 people out of 6,574 infected in West Africa since last March, a senior WHO official said Friday.

GlaxoSmithKline has begun clinical trials of its vaccine in the United States and Britain, to be followed by a trial starting in Mali next week, while NewLink vaccine trials are about to start in the United States and Germany, said Dr. Marie-Paule Kieny, WHO assistant director-general.

"So we hope that we will have these results on both vaccines by the end of the year, before the end of the year, that would, again, this is pending everything going well of course, and that if everything goes well again we might be able to use some of these vaccines in affected countries at the beginning, the very beginning of next year, in January," Kieny told a news briefing in Geneva.

She stressed however that the shots are experimental and have not yet been shown to work against Ebola, saying they have given promising results in monkeys, but that monkeys are not humans.

Data will be collected from clinical trials when the experimental vaccines are being given to healthy volunteers who are then monitored for adverse side effects and to see if the shot elicits an immune response in their blood.

Regulators at the European Medicines Agency (EMA) said on Friday they would begin reviewing data on experimental Ebola medicines to support any decisions made on whether to use them for treating patients.

And the global vaccines alliance GAVI -- the world's biggest funder of immunizations for people in poor countries -- said in a statement that it was exploring how it could help speed up the availability of any Ebola vaccines that prove effective.

Canada has given 800 vials of the NewLink candidate vaccine to WHO, expected to yield at least 1,500 doses, Kieny said.

"In terms of vaccines, there are several candidates but we are focusing in WHO mainly on two. One which is based on what is called chimpanzee adenovirus, which is a recombinant viral vector. This is developed by the company GSK. The other one is based on another virus which is called VSV and is developed by a company in the U.S. called Newlink. It's this second vaccine which has been donated by the Canadian government to the level of 800 vials to WHO. And what we are doing now is working with clinicians, with regulators, with both companies, to accelerate the clinical trials of these vaccines," Kieny said.

GSK has said it hopes to have 10,000 doses of its experimental vaccine by the end of this year.

Kieny said an experimental Ebola vaccine being developed by Johnson & Johnson but not yet ready for trials in humans is also under consideration.

Experimental Ebola drugs including compounds from Mapp Biopharmaceutical, Sarepta and Tekmira will be tested in affected states for the first time in a bid to fast-track trials, the Wellcome Trust said on Tuesday. WHO is taking part in that effort, Kieny said.

ZMapp has been used to treat several Ebola patients, but doctors cannot say for sure whether the drug helped them or whether they would have recovered anyway.

The use of blood transfusion and infusion of human serum from Ebola survivors is recognized as a "safe treatment", but donated blood must be screened for infections including HIV and hepatitis, she said.

There was only anecdotal information on its use in Ebola-infected healthcare workers, as there is no system in place, but progress was being made, Kieny said.

"In terms of plasma, there's also a lot of movement, a lot of interest from both the affected countries but also from many partners. WHO has released guidelines for the safe use of whole blood transfusion to treat Ebola patients and we are working with many partners to help put in the affected countries' material which would allow these countries to do plasmapheresis in order to extract plasma from recovered patients, convalescent patients, in order to be able to prepare a serum and to treat further patients in the country, so this is also something that is moving ahead quite readily," she said.