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 The shipment, of an initial 300 vials of the vaccine, will be the
first to arrive in one of the three main Ebola-affected African
countries, GSK said in a statement.
It will be used in the first large-scale vaccine trials in coming
weeks, in which healthcare workers helping to care for Ebola
patients will be among the first to get it.
Researchers hope eventually to enroll up to 30,000 people in the
trial, a third of whom would get GSK's candidate vaccine.
The vaccine, co-developed by the National Institutes of Health in
the United States and Okairos, a biotechnology firm acquired by GSK
in 2013, is currently being tested in five small phase I safety
trials in Britain, the United States, Switzerland and Mali involving
around 200 healthy volunteers in total.
"The initial phase I data ... are encouraging and give us confidence
to progress to the next phases of clinical testing which will
involve the vaccination of thousands of volunteers, including
frontline healthcare workers," said Moncef Slaoui, GSK's Global
Vaccines chief.
The vaccine uses a type of chimpanzee cold virus to deliver safe
genetic material from the Zaire strain of Ebola, the strain
responsible for the unprecedented West African epidemic.
Data so far show "an acceptable safety profile" including in a West
African population and across a range of dose levels, GSK said,
adding it had now selected the most appropriate dosage for the
Liberia trial.
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The World Health Organization said on Thursday the Ebola outbreak in
West Africa appears to be waning but cautioned against complacency
in an epidemic that has seen 21,724 cases reported in nine countries
since it started in Guinea a year ago. Some 8,641 people have died,
according to WHO data.
Slaoui stressed that GSK's shot, like other candidates from a
NewLink Genetics and Merck collaboration, and from Johnson & Johnson
and Bavarian Nordic, is still in development and can't be deployed
unless and until it proves safe and effective.
"Any potential future use in mass vaccination campaigns will depend
on whether the WHO, regulators and other stakeholders are satisfied
... and how quickly large quantities ... can be made," he said.
(Editing by James Dalgleish)
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