It Looks Like A Former GSK / Now Sabine Inst. Vaccine Candidate Will Be First One Tested — Against Current Sudan Variant In Uganda…

The JNJ version I mentioned a few days ago (via its Janssen arm), is apparently in mothballs, and will need internal approvals to restart manufacture of sufficient stock / vials for any meaningful field trial in Mubende District in Uganda. So that means another candidate is likely to be first.

And, in fact, GSK stopped work on this “Sudan” version — one that uses a chimp adenovirus container, to deliver the glycoprotein of the Sudan variant, into the patient (and provoke an immune response) — after the 2016 successes of the Merck version (for Zaire Ebola).

So, GSK then donated the vaccine stocks and all tech / know-how to the Sabine Vaccine Institute, a global health charity, with HQ in DC. It may be the one most rapidly able to deploy, with over 10,000 doses already in vials, for field trials. All that is needed now is a final green light, from Ugandan authorities.

With now 36 cases, already (and 25 dead), here is the latest from Helen Branswell’s fine reporting this morning, for STAT+ — and a bit:

…“We are working with Uganda and WHO to determine the best way to use these doses in the current outbreak,” Richard Koup, acting director of the VCR, told STAT in an email. “The Sabin Vaccine Institute has bulk drug substance for thousands of vaccine doses that must be vialed; they are currently working through the timeline for those activities.”

There are six candidate vaccines, as experimental vaccines are called, that target Ebola Sudan. But only three have advanced to the stage where human clinical trials have begun.

In all three cases, the human trials have been the small initial trials that determine how much vaccine should be given in a dose. Those trials also generate enough safety and immunogenicity data to show that a candidate vaccine appears to be safe enough to proceed with testing, and provide enough evidence of potential benefit to pursue larger trials aimed at determining whether the vaccine actually works….

And — shifting into the inky nights ahead, we should start seeing ice encrusted Europa close-ups (raw images at least), into the coming weekend, out of Juno’s recent flyby. Smile… that’s some happier news, indeed.

नमस्ते