Canada Will Ship 800 Doses of Experimental Ebola Drug to WHO

The WSJ reports that 800 doses of an experimental vaccine for Ebola, developed over a decade at Public Health Agency of Canada’s main laboratory in Winnipeg, will be shipped to the World Health Organization in an effort to help fight the ongoing Ebola crisis in West Africa: The vaccine will be shipped by air from Winnipeg, Manitoba, to the University Hospital of Geneva via specialized courier. The vials will be sent in three separate shipments as a precautionary measure, due to the challenges in moving a vaccine that must kept at a very low temperature at all times. ... The vaccine had shown “very promising results in animal research” and earlier this week, Ottawa announced the start of clinical trials on humans at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in the U.S. ... The government has licensed NewLink Genetics Corp. , of the U.S., through its wholly owned subsidiary BioProtection Systems Corp. to further develop the vaccine for use in humans. The government owns the intellectual property rights associated with the vaccine.

Comments

Re:There is a better drug in my opinion.

[RDW]

There are three very different agents here:

ZMapp - engineered antibodies to EBOV.

Favipiravir - small molecule, presumably made by standard organic synthesis techniques, active against the RNA polymerases (key replication enzymes) of quite a broad range of RNA viruses (including influenza virus).

VSV-EBOV - (what the Canadians are shipping). A vaccine rather than a treatment, made by using molecular cloning to insert specific EBOV proteins into an unrelated, harmless virus. It will be propagated in mammalian cells rather than the tobacco-plant based method used for ZMapp production.