A volunteer was injected on Friday with the first dose of a rapidly developed vaccine targeting the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola driving a deadly outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Oxford University said.
More than 1,270 people have been killed out of nearly 3,000 infections in the DRC and Uganda since the outbreak emerged in May, according to the most recent figures from the World Health Organization.
Researchers and health organisations have since been racing to get a vaccine or treatment for the relatively rare strain to the clinical trial stage where it is tested on humans.
Earlier this month, a team at Oxford University in the UK announced it was launching the first trial for its ChAdOx1 BDBV vaccine, which uses the same technology as AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine.
The first dose was administered to a 37-year-old volunteer named Ed Hunt in Oxford on Friday, a university spokesman told AFP.
“We’ve taken this vaccine candidate from concept to clinic in just eight weeks,” David Pulido-Gomez of Oxford’s Pandemic Sciences Institute said in a statement.
“Reaching this milestone in such a short timeframe reflects an extraordinary collaborative effort,” he added.
The trial received funding from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), while the Serum Institute of India has already manufactured a stockpile of 620,000 doses.
The phase 1 trial plans to assess the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine in 50 healthy adults in the coming weeks. The researchers are currently recruiting more volunteers.
Given regulatory approval, the team is preparing for more clinical studies of the vaccine with partners in Uganda, Oxford said.
Several other Bundibugyo vaccine candidates are also being urgently developed towards the trial stage, while two potential treatments are being worked on.
– Outbreak outpacing response –
The Ebola outbreak is the 17th in the DRC’s history, but just the third caused by the Bundibugyo strain, for which there are no approved vaccines or treatments.
“The outbreak continues to outpace the response,” partly because contact tracing cannot reach every remote community, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote on X late Thursday.
He also warned that “because insecurity and active conflict continue to limit access to affected areas, it is estimated that the actual number of people who have the disease could be more than twice as many.”
The outbreak has remained concentrated in the vast country’s mineral-rich and conflict-plagued northeastern province.
Cases of Ebola, which spreads through close contact and infected bodily fluids, have also been found in four other DRC provinces.
