Still No Ebola Vaccine?

Still No Ebola Vaccine?

More than a decade ago, scientific research produced a viable Ebola vaccine candidate that worked in monkeys and was ready for testing in humans. Those tests never happened.

The economics of drug and vaccine development stopped that research from even approaching clinical trials until just recently –after the Ebola outbreak in West Africa spread to five countries in Africa and then became a global threat as travelers and health care workers brought the disease to Europe and the United States.  

While the current Ebola outbreak is the largest on record, Ebola’s history has been that of a sporadic disease. The first incidence of Ebola in Africa was in 1976, according to the World Health Organization.

 Since then, outbreaks of the disease have been sporadic and isolated, affecting patients by the hundreds. Today, however, the WHO counts more than 5,000 dead and counting from the current Ebola outbreak.

Understanding the historic rarity of Ebola is key to understanding why we have no Ebola vaccine yet, and also why a promising Ebola vaccine developed in the early 2000s is only now in the discussion for tests in humans.

Drug companies make money by producing products that can be sold to large populations. With Ebola’s historic record presenting a small potential market, there was no money to be made from an Ebola vaccine treating a small population of mostly poor, rural people.

Dr. Thomas Geisbert, one of the researchers who developed that vaccine, told The New York Times that the promising Ebola vaccine that was developed in the early 2000s was shelved and left untested in humans because large pharmaceutical companies saw only a small commercial market for the disease,

“There’s never been a big market for Ebola vaccines,” Giesbert said. “So big pharma, who are they going to sell it to?

In fact, such an effort would likely lose money. Even after the years spent researching and developing new vaccines and drugs, these potential medical products need even more time to run the gamut of clinical trials needed for Food and Drug Administration approval. Those trials take thousands of patients and can cost tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars.

If a product is approved, a pharmaceutical company could recoup those costs from product sales. But with no regular patient population for an Ebola vaccine to address, a pharmaceutical company sees no way to even break even.

The spread of Ebola in Africa and beyond has prompted a change in thinking. A newer version of the Ebola vaccine that was developed a decade ago is being tested in animals in preparation of bringing the vaccine into human testing. Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline has already started vaccine trials in a human population group that it identified in partnership with the National Institutes of Health. Johnson & Johnson has also started work on its own Ebola vaccine.

Although the tide is turning for vaccines, economics are still a major driver for the effort. If an Ebola vaccine proves successful in clinical trials, it will finally have paying customers – the U.S. government, as well as governments of other nations looking for safeguards against an infectious disease.