Is There the Possibility of an Ebola Vaccine?

With talk of the Ebola virus outbreak in Guinea, West Africa, heavy on our minds, perhaps we can turn our attention away from the possibility of a further spread, to the more positive prospect of a human vaccine for the virus.

The human interest in this disease is understandable given the high rate of mortality following infection. As described by New Scientist’s Threatwatch coverage of the outbreak, the disease is seen as ‘hot-button virus’ as it gets more coverage in the news than other fatal diseases such as Measles.

The difference here is the availability of a vaccine. There is currently no vaccine for Ebola and with different strains of the virus for each outbreak, the development of a vaccine is as complicated as that of the HIV virus.
A human therapeutic vaccine for Ebola is possible with new technologies, and has in the past been effective after a researcher contracted Ebola while working at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine (BNI) in Hamburg. The researcher was injected with an experimental vaccine (untested and not cleaned-up) consisting of a live vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) carrying an Ebola protein.

Therapies to treat the infection once an individual has contracted the virus have also been developed but unrefined. A small interfering RNA molecule-based therapeutic, which sabotages three of the virus's vital genes, was developed in 2010. Four rhesus monkeys infected with the virus all survived after receiving the drug for seven days, starting 30 minutes after infection. The drug is in further development, however the need for the development of such a therapeutic when Africa struggles to vaccinate its population against Measles - for which there is a readily available vaccine -is questionable.