WHO starts Ebola vaccine clinical trial in eastern DR Congo outbreak
The World Health Organization has announced the start of the first clinical trial of an Ebola vaccine in the current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The trial began in Bunia, the capital of Ituri province in the country's northeast, which officials say is the epicentre of the outbreak. Participants were vaccinated with Ervebo, a vaccine already approved for use against the more common Zaire strain of Ebola.
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WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the trial is intended to test whether the vaccine can offer cross-protection against the Bundibugyo species of Ebola, which is driving the epidemic. He said the study will help determine whether vaccine candidates designed for Bundibugyo virus work, and described the effort as a DRC-led initiative supported by WHO. The trial is being run under the Tumaini framework, a single trial structure designed to assess the safety, efficacy and immunogenicity of multiple vaccines.
The approach will use ring vaccination, meaning contacts judged to be at high risk of infection will be immunised. WHO said the trial is expected to include pregnant women and children aged 12 and older, a step that could generate evidence for groups often left out of clinical studies. The organisation's emergencies director, Chikwe Ihekweazu, said the aim is to produce rigorous evidence on whether the participating vaccines can help control the outbreak.
The trial comes as the DRC faces what it has described as its 17th and worst-ever Ebola outbreak. The country declared the outbreak in May and has since reported more than 9,700 cases and more than 4,600 deaths, according to the figures cited by WHO. The agency has also triggered a public health emergency of international concern, its second-highest alert level, underscoring the seriousness of the situation.
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The outbreak has now been reported in four countries across eastern, central and western Africa, giving it the widest geographic spread of any Ebola outbreak on the continent to date. That wider spread increases the importance of vaccine research and outbreak control measures, especially in areas where health systems are already under strain. The trial also reflects a broader effort to move from emergency response to evidence-based prevention while the outbreak is still active.
Two Bundibugyo-specific candidate vaccines are expected to join the trial shortly, according to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. One is a ChAdOx1 adenoviral vector vaccine being developed by the University of Oxford, and the other uses mRNA technology and is being developed by Moderna. WHO has not said when results from the first phase of the trial will be available, and it remains unclear how quickly the additional candidates will be added or how soon any findings could affect the wider response.
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