A clinical trial of the preventative vaccine for the Ebola virus, produced by British pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline, may begin next month and will be made available by 2015, the World Health Organisation has said.
According to a French news wire, Agence-France Presse, the World Health body's Head of Vaccines and Immunisation, Jean-Marie Okwo Bele, told French radio on Saturday that it planned to begin the clinical trials in the United States and Africa.
He added that he was optimistic about making the vaccine commercially available. "We are targeting September for the start of clinical trials, first in the United States and certainly in African countries, since that's where we have the cases.
"We think that if we start in September, we could already have results by the end of the year. "And since this is an emergency, we can put emergency procedures in place, so that we can have a vaccine available by 2015," Bele said.
Recall that several vaccines are being tested, and a treatment made by San Diego-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, ZMapp, has shown promising results on monkeys and may have been effective in treating two Americans recently infected in Africa.
