Ebola Vaccine Passes Initial Human Tests

An anonymous reader writes "Washingtonpost.com has an article about the first successful tests of an Ebola vaccine on human subjects." From the article: "Nabel and colleagues at the NIH's Vaccine Research Center developed a vaccine made of DNA strands that encode three Ebola proteins. They boosted that vaccine with a weakened cold-related virus, and the combination protected monkeys exposed to Ebola. The first human testing looked just at the vaccine's DNA portion; the full combination will be tested later. At a microbiology meeting in Washington on Friday, Nabel and colleagues reported seeing no worrisome side effects when comparing six people given dummy shots with 21 volunteers given increasing doses of the DNA vaccine."

Re:What is Ebola?

[Kohaku Nanaya]

Ebola is certainly deadly. If anything, it's underhyped. The thing that is overhyped however, is the "it will kill us all!" mentality. Sure, it's one of the most gruesome and deadly viruses around (classified even higher than AIDS), but it is spread only by direct contact with infected fluids. And when someone has Ebola, you KNOW they have it, and there is little chance you'll be close enough to the person to get infected. It mainly is prevalent in places like Africa, since they reuse needles in their hospitals there. Ebola takes 2 weeks or so after initial infection (about a week before anything starts to show up) to kill, or come close to killing a victim. It surrounds and destroys cells, and it is known to partially or completely liquify the kidneys and liver. There is craploads of bleeding from every orifice, and vomitting dead blood. They say even one droplet of blood at that stage contains at least 100,000,000 particles of the virus. It just destroys you, literally. There are a few strains, the one of the lowest mortality rate being 50%, and the highest being 90%.

Re:Medical experiments for the lot of us...

[Medinole]

Participants in clinical trials are required to be told what is or could be happening to them throughout the trial. For drug trials that make it to the clinical stage, single or double blind methods are used depending on how far along the drug is on its way to the market. Participants are told that they will be given either the drug or a placebo, and are monitored for any side effects. In this case, no one has actually been infected with ebola. All that has been done is the administration of a vaccine to see if it elicited an immune response (the participants made antibodies against ebola) and to see if it had any obvious side effects (it did not).

Re:What is Ebola?

[Mysterius]

Actually, Ebola has an incubation period of up to 3 weeks. Symptoms only appear after the incubation period. That means it is quite possible for someone to be infected and not notice. Check out the "Myths" section in Wikipedia's article on Ebola.

Re:Medical experiments for the lot of us...

[Mysterius]

I can see why people might be concerned, but reading the article carefully can help a lot. As someone pointed out earlier, the test were to just study the immune reaction to the vaccine, not to actually infect anyone. The test subjects produced antibodies to the virus, so it passed the trial.

Re:waste of resources

[Mike570]

considering the rarity of ebola, what's the point of a vaccine? Who do you even give it to? From wikipedia: "Of the approximate 1,500 identified Ebola cases worldwide, over 80% of the patients have died." Maybe we should be working on a cure for fan death instead.

It could be used to help fight an outbreak. Right now the only thing we have is isolation. If we could send health workers a few dozen miles ahead of the outbreak to start innoculating people, that might stop the outbreak in its tracks. Of course, it may take a while for full immunity to take effect but I imagine even partial immunity is better than nothing.

Re:Medical experiments for the lot of us...

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

I don't think they could have been injected with Ebola, ethics aside, outside a Level 4 lab. What they got was "a vaccine made of DNA strands that encode three Ebola proteins". The monkeys, by comparison, got a cold virus with the DNA spliced in.

Adverse reaction considerations

[aschoff_nodule]

Without discounting their achievement, I would like to say that 21 people is very less a number to be satisfied about the safety of a drug. Lethal idiosyncratic aplastic anemia in chloramphenicol occurs in 1 in 25000 people, which was sufficient for this drug to be almost kicked out of the market (it is only used where all other drugs have failed).

Also, it is yet to be seen if side effects appear in the patients in the presence of Ebola virus, since all these subjects were not exposed to Ebola virus (ofcourse it is not ethical to do such an experiment, but we will come to know of that only after the vaccine comes out in the market - via Phase IV trials).

Re:What is Ebola?

[SnoopJeDi]

Read The Hot Zone [amazon.com] and you'll never make such a drastically wrong statement about Ebola ever again. It's some seriously nasty shit. In fact, if you just read the excerpt about Charles Monet's infection and eventual death, it will probably set you straight.

Ebola makes liquid smoothies out of people, and the scare in Reston in 1989 shows how drastic an epidemic could be. If a strain of Ebola resembling Zaire in lethality towards humans and the airborne characteristics of Reston were to evolve, it would be a bad day for a lot of people.

Re:VACCINE FOR A BACTERIA???

[Biomechanical]

Khyber, Ebola is a virus, not a bacteria.

Ebola is a filovirus, one of the simplest and deadliest that we know of on earth.

If I remember correctly, it is a string of biological matter that consists of six proteins and looks under a microscope like a shepherd's crook.

It infects cells in the human body - both blood and tissue - and replicates quite rapidly utilizing the body's own RNA strands until the cell literally bursts and releases quite a large quantity of the newly formed virus, which then infects more cells and repeats the process.

Ebola's only purpose is to replicate inside the warm biological matter of humans and monkeys, destroying cellular tissue as it goes about its "life cycle".

Ebola Zaire kills about 9 out of 10 people it comes into direct contact with, and Marburg - another filovirus - kills about 8 out of 10.

Ebola Reston was first found in Washington state in a storage facility built to house monkeys. It infected two workers who came into contact with dead or infected monkeys, but it didn't kill them.

Ebola Reston and Ebola Zaire are 1 marker apart in their protein make-up, but Zaire kills humans while Reston doesn't seem to, yet.

However, Ebola Reston seems capable of moving through the air, hence monkeys in the storage warehouse getting sick without contact with each other but all breathing the same re-circulated air conditioned air inside.

Ebola Zaire, deadly, only contractable through contact with infected bodily fluids. Ebola Reston, one protein different and apparently able to be breathed out by an infected person and infect someone else, like a cold.

Think about that.

I hope that this anti-viral vaccine is able to be produced quickly and cheaply because we don't want an outbreak of mutated Reston.

Re:Medical experiments for the lot of us...

[MeandmyShadow]

I volunteered for this study and was given the DNA vaccine. One of the heftier dosages.

I was compensated, something like $25 a visit, hard to remember now, but in terms of travel time, not to mention a whole lot of holes poked in my arms, I wouldn't say that was the main attraction.

A friend talked to me about it who spent quite a lot of time in Africa, and I joined him.

I'm looking forward to finding out how long the antibodies remain (without the cold virus to help 'em spread a bit, probably not long) and what sort of protection they confer. Now that the study has been announced I'm going to have to hassle the researchers for a little more data on us.

And they say no side effects. Dunno, I seemed to have been sick every other week that winter. Could've just been coincidence though, or hypochondria.