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 WHO is working with pharmaceutical companies and regulators to
accelerate the use of a range of potential treatments to fight the
disease, a senior WHO official said. Ebola has no cure and has
killed at least 3,091 out of 6,574 people infected in West Africa
since an outbreak began in March.
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.
"If everything goes well again we might be able to start to use some
of these vaccines in affected countries at the very beginning of
next year, in January. This will not be a mass vaccination campaign,
let's be clear about that because the quantity which will be
available doesn't make this possible," Kieny told a news briefing in
Geneva.
She stressed however that the shots were experimental and had not
yet been shown to work against Ebola: "They have given very
promising results in monkeys, but monkeys are not humans.
"We could still face a situation where these vaccines would be
unsafe in humans or where they would do nothing in terms of
protection. So we need to be very prudent."
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.
Canada has given 800 vials of the NewLink candidate vaccine to WHO,
expected to yield at least 1,500 doses, Kieny said. The U.S.-based
firm is "working very hard to produce a few more thousand doses in
the coming months", she added.
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 was also under
consideration.
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ZMAPP DOSES BY YEAR-END
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. "We are starting to
discuss with African sites to see which would be the most suitable
to test these new drugs and establish as soon as possible which one
gives an advantage for survival to patients."
ZMapp has been used to treat several Ebola patients who have since
recovered, but doctors cannot say for sure whether the drug helped
them or whether they would have recovered anyway.
"In terms of ZMapp the best, as we have known for a few weeks now,
is that maybe a few hundred doses will be available by the end of
the year. But clearly this is not the kind of scale that can have
impact on the epidemic curve," Kieny said of the drug by the
California-based private biotech firm.
The use of blood transfusion and infusion of human serum from Ebola
survivors is recognised 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.
"Will it be efficacious? For the time being we don't know because
there are not enough people who have been treated," Kieny said,
adding that they could be counted on two hands.
"This is something where the African population doesn't have to wait
for anybody else to develop it for them. This is why there is a lot
of enthusiasm," Kieny said.
(Additional reporting by Tom Miles in Geneva by Kate Kelland in
London and David Lewis in Dakar; editing by Kate Kelland and Gareth
Jones)
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