Accelerated Ebola vaccination schedule effective in non-human primates.

2003 SEP 17 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- An accelerated Ebola vaccination schedule was effective in protecting non-human primates against Ebola virus hemorrhagic fever.

"Containment of highly lethal Ebola virus outbreaks poses a serious public health challenge. Although an experimental vaccine has successfully protected non-human primates against disease, more than six months was required to complete the immunizations, making it impractical to limit an acute epidemic. Here, we report the development of accelerated vaccination against Ebola virus in non-human primates," researchers in the United States report.

"The antibody response to immunization with an adenoviral (ADV) vector encoding the Ebola glycoprotein (GP) was induced more rapidly than with DNA priming and ADV boosting, but it was of lower magnitude," said Nancy J. Sullivan and collaborators at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the U. S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. "To determine whether this earlier immune response could nonetheless protect against disease, cynomolgus macaques were challenged with Ebola virus after vaccination with ADV-GP and nucleoprotein (NP) vectors. Protection was highly effective and correlated with the generation of Ebola-specific ...