The World Health Organization today will conclude its two-day meeting of 200 researchers who aim to speed up development of experimental drugs and vaccines to fight the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
WHO assistant director general Marie Paule Kieny is expected to hold a news conference at noon ET Friday from Geneva to discuss results from the meeting.
- COMING UP LIVE: WHO news conference on experimental Ebola therapies
The UN health agency said that as of Aug. 31, there were 2,685 cases and 1,841 deaths reported in the outbreak in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone — the largest, most severe and most complex outbreak of Ebola disease in history.
On Friday, the WHO concludes its consultation between policymakers from Ebola-affected countries, ethicists, clinicians, researchers, regulators and patient representatives on potential Ebola therapies and vaccines. The meeting in Geneva includes nine Canadians.
The purpose of the meeting is to:
- Review and evaluate the current state of development of interventions for Ebola virus disease (therapies and vaccines).
- Agree the overall objectives for a plan for evaluation and use of potential interventions.
- Identify and identify the most important actions that need to be taken.
- Establish what support is required.
This week, the first clinical trial on humans of one potential vaccine began at a U.S. lab in Bethesda, Md. Three people have been immunized out of 20 healthy adults who will be injected.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says there's a misperception that experimental interventions will control the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. (Alex Brandon/Associated Press)
"When we say fast-track we mean we are doing it in an expedited manner," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is working on the Phase 1 clinical trial. "We are not cutting corners. You want to make sure that when you do any intervention in a human that above all it is safe and above all you do no harm."
U.S. missionary enters treatment
On Friday, a U.S. missionary infected with the Ebola virus in Liberia entered a treatment centre in Nebraska, a spokeswoman for the medical centre said.
Dr. Rick Sacra, a 51-year-old Boston physician, worked for SIM USA in West Africa, as did U.S. missionary Nancy Writebol.
Writebol received ZMapp, an experimental drug cocktail. Earlier this week, she credited her recovery to ZMapp, supportive care, medical treatment in Liberia and in Atlanta and her faith.
On Thursday, a second potential Ebola vaccine, developed in part at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to start its own clinical trial.
The Canadian-developed vaccine VSV-EBOV is licensed to a U.S. company, which hopes to begin testing in humans this month.
"Everybody is trying as hard and furiously as possible to move those trials forward as rapidly as possible with the regulations, scientific and ethical constraints," NewLink founder Charles Link told Reuters on the sidelines of the WHO meeting on Thursday.
The Canadian government has said it will donate between 800 and 1,000 doses of an experimental Ebola vaccine to the WHO for use in the Ebola response.
Other interventions urged
If early clinical trials are successful, vaccines could be tested on Ebola patients in West Africa by early next year.
But Fauci and other doctors caution that what's most likely to control the outbreak are proven interventions, such as health-care workers in the field, more protective gear, basic medical care like IV fluids and better tracking of the sick.
"I think there is a bit of a misperception that the epidemic is out of control and what is going to control it is these experimental interventions," Fauci said.
If the early human safety trials work, experts say funding and scaling up production of the experimental therapies will also be a challenge.
"Although the development of medicines against Ebola is ongoing, the majority of patients affected by the virus do not have access to these treatments," Health Canada said in a statement on Friday.
"Regulators therefore also stress that the search for pharmaceutical interventions must not detract from the need to strengthen basic health-care measures such as fluids and electrolytes management and to carefully observe the impact and contribution of these measures in the overall response to the disease."
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