WHO welcomes approval of second Ebola vaccine trial in Switzerland

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Thursday welcomed the approval for a second trial with an experimental Ebola vaccine by regulatory authority in Switzerland.
The experimental VSV-ZEBOV vaccine, developed by the Public Health Agency of Canada, based on the virus that causes vesicular stomatitis, a disease affecting animals.
This virus has been weakened and genetically modified to express the glycoprotein of the Zaire Ebola virus (ZEBOV) so as to provoke an immune response against real Ebola viruses.
According to Swissmedic, the Swiss regulatory authority for therapeutic products, the vaccine will be tested on approximately 115 volunteers in Geneva and led by the University Hospitals of Geneva.
The trial begins with the first vaccinations in next week, with first results expected in December 2014. It will test the safety of the vaccine and its ability to provoke an immune response.
Meanwhile, VSV-ZEBOV is also being tested on healthy volunteers in the United States and trials are planned to start very soon in Germany, Gabon and Kenya.
If judged safe, larger scale trials will be taken to African countries as early as January 2015.
The trial is the second one organized in Switzerland. The vaccine ChAd3 started trials in Lausanne at the end of October.
"If the vaccines prove to be safe and effective and we move to production and distribution scale-up, this will be the fastest vaccine roll-out we have had in response to a public health emergency to date," WHO Assistant Director-General Marie-Paule Kieny said in a statement.