A killer strain of Ebola that has largely flown under the radar could soon have its first-ever vaccine, thanks to a team of British researchers who say human trials might begin within months.
The strain in question is Bundibugyo ebolavirus, a particularly nasty variant first identified in Uganda in 2007. It kills roughly one in three people it infects, and unlike the more widely studied Zaire strain, there’s currently no proven vaccine to stop it spreading.
Scientists at the University of Oxford’s Jenner Institute, the same team behind the AstraZeneca COVID-19 jab, have been quietly working on a candidate vaccine using a chimpanzee adenovirus vector. It’s a familiar approach for them, and early results in animal models have apparently been encouraging enough to push toward a Phase 1 safety trial.
“Bundibugyo has been somewhat neglected compared to other strains, partly because outbreaks have been smaller in scale. But that doesn’t make it any less dangerous to those it reaches,” one researcher involved in the project told a medical briefing last week.
Bundibugyo outbreaks have been recorded in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan. The 2007 outbreak infected 149 people and killed 37. Smaller than the devastating 2014 West Africa crisis, yes, but the mortality rate is comparable, and the lack of any targeted vaccine has always been a glaring gap.
The hope is that a broad-spectrum Ebola vaccine covering multiple strains could eventually replace the current patchwork of strain-specific tools. The existing Ervebo vaccine, approved in 2019, only protects against the Zaire strain.
Funding has come partly through the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which has made it a priority to close these vaccine gaps before the next major outbreak forces everyone’s hand.
It’s worth remembering that speed isn’t everything here. A trial starting in months still means years before widespread deployment, assuming everything goes well. But the direction of travel is genuinely positive.
The bigger question, perhaps, is whether global health funding will hold up long enough to see this one through to the finish line.
