Study vaccine protects monkeys against four types of hemorrhagic fever viruses

Scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health have developed an investigational vaccine that protected cynomolgus macaques against four types of hemorrhagic fever viruses endemic to overlapping regions in Africa. The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and Profectus BioSciences of New York are developing and testing the candidate quadrivalent VesiculoVax vaccine, with support from NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Redeemer's University in Nigeria. The newly published study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation describes how the vaccine was created using a live-attenuated (weakened) vesicular stomatitis virus to deliver proteins that elicit protective immune responses. The proteins are from Ebola virus (Kikwit strain), Sudan virus (Boniface strain, which also causes Ebola virus disease), Marburg virus (Angola strain) and Lassa virus (Josiah strain). There are no licensed vaccines to provide protection from any of those viruses—all of which can cause severe disease and death—although the European Medicines Agency has recommended licensing a VSV-Ebola vaccine.