The vaccine candidate is being evaluated in a ring vaccination trial as part of a comprehensive public health response
NEW YORK CITY, NY / ACCESS Newswire / February 3, 2025 / The first participants have been vaccinated with an investigational Ebola Sudan vaccine candidate provided by IAVI, a nonprofit scientific research organization, as part of a World Health Organization (WHO)-led ring vaccination trial taking place at Makerere University Lung Institute in Kampala. WHO prioritized evaluation of IAVI’s candidate vaccine, which was already prepositioned in Uganda, as part of a global collaborative effort supporting the country’s Ebola outbreak response.
This is Uganda’s sixth outbreak of Ebola Sudan, which causes severe hemorrhagic fever disease with a case fatality rate of up to 50%. No licensed vaccines or therapeutics are available for Ebola Sudan, a Category A priority pathogen. Existing Ebola Zaire vaccines are not cross-protective for Ebola Sudan.
Mark Feinberg, M.D., Ph.D., IAVI president and CEO, said: “IAVI is grateful for the efforts that the WHO, the Ugandan government, and our public health partners in Uganda have made in enabling the rapid deployment of our investigational Ebola Sudan vaccine candidate to address the ongoing outbreak of Ebola Sudan in Uganda. We believe this clinical trial represents an important step toward evaluating the potential of IAVI’s vaccine to protect exposed individuals from Ebola Sudan infection as well as demonstrating its value as a safe, effective, and accessible new tool to include in comprehensive outbreak responses in the future. Critically, having vaccine doses readily available in country made it possible for us all to mobilize in just days and to be able to incorporate evaluation of a promising Ebola Sudan vaccine clinical trial into the public health response very soon after the first reports of the current outbreak.”
Uganda’s current Ebola outbreak began on Jan. 30 with a confirmed infection in a health worker who died in Kampala, and since then 45 contacts have been identified. Close contacts are at elevated risk of infection and are prioritized for inclusion in a ring vaccination trial.
A study published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine confirms the high-level effectiveness of ring vaccination in containing Ebola outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The vaccine assessed in that study – ERVEBO®, Merck’s single-dose Zaire ebolavirus vaccine – uses the same recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus (rVSV) viral vector platform as IAVI’s Ebola Sudan vaccine candidate. ERVEBO® is licensed in more than a dozen countries.
More about IAVI’s investigational Ebola Sudan vaccine candidate
In 2023, IAVI initiated a Phase 1 clinical trial of its rVSV-based Ebola Sudan vaccine candidate. The study was designed to evaluate the Ebola Sudan vaccine candidate in healthy U.S. adult volunteers at three dose levels. Initial results from that study indicate that the candidate vaccine was well tolerated across all three groups; immune responses were also detected in all three groups. These data were shared in November 2024 during the annual meeting American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. As a follow-up to this study, IAVI and our partners are currently planning a Phase 1 study in Africa.
In addition to being the backbone of the Ebola Sudan vaccine candidate, rVSV is the platform technology utilized in IAVI’s portfolio of emerging infectious disease (EID) candidates, including a Lassa virus vaccine candidate currently in Phase 2 clinical trials in West Africa, supported by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP).
Rose Catlos
rcatlos@iavi.org
+12128471049
SOURCE: IAVI
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