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Novavax Begins Enrollment in Ebola Vaccine Trial

February 19, 2015

Novavax, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, kicked off enrollment last week in an Australian Phase I Ebola vaccine trial.

The vaccine maker says it could continue to scale up manufacturing to produce millions of doses in a short amount of time. Novavax has already ramped up production and conducted preclinical trials since September.

The randomized, blinded, dose-ranging Ebola GlycoProtein Vaccine Trial will evaluate the safety and immunogenicity of a vaccine based on a protein from the Makona strain that is currently circulating in West Africa. To protocol calls for 230 healthy adults between 18 and 50 years old to receive intramuscular injections on days 0 and 21 of the study.

In preclinical trials, the vaccine protected 100 percent of nonhuman primates, compared with none in the control arm.

Since Ebola broke out in Guinea in December 2013, a number of companies have been racing to create vaccines and antiviral therapies. The farthest along is a National Institutes of Health/GlaxoSmithKline vaccine currently being tested in Africa. — Lena Freund