Scientists are racing against time to develop and test effective vaccines and treatments against the Marburg virus, a pathogen in the same family as Ebola that causes hemorrhagic fever and is causing an outbreak in Rwanda.
There is currently no vaccine or treatment available for Marburg virus disease. Therefore, the recommendation of the World Health Organization (WHO) is that people who present symptoms similar to those of the disease seek early care for supportive treatment that can improve the patient’s survival.
However, there are already some vaccine candidates in development, according to the WHO. In press releasethe organization says it is working in partnership with the government of Rwanda to provide information and access to Murburg vaccine and therapeutic candidates to be tested in clinical trials. The Rwandan Ministry of Health has already appointed two experienced researchers to lead the trials.
Testing plans had already been drawn up after an outbreak of the Marburg virus in 2023, in Equatorial Guinea — at the time, the country recorded 12 deaths, among 17 confirmed cases and another 23 probable cases of death. However, no experimental drugs were tested during the outbreak.
In an interview with NatureIra Longini, a biostatistician at the University of Florida in Gainesville and a member of the WHO’s Marburg Virus Vaccine Consortium (MARVAC), said that if the Rwandan outbreak continues, the plan is to test at least one vaccine in a strategy called “ring vaccination”. The approach involves immunizing close people who have had contact with an infected person and showed efficacy of an Ebola vaccine in Guinea during the 2014 West African outbreak.
Vaccines in development
Several vaccines are already in different stages of development to prevent the Marburg virus. One of them is the vaccine from the Sabin Vaccine Institute, which launched a phase 2 clinical trial for its vaccine in October 2023. According to statement released by the institutehealthy volunteers received a single dose of the vaccine at the Makerere University Walter Reed Project (MUWRP) in Kampala, Uganda.
In phase 1 studies, Sabin’s experimental vaccine was found to be promising in phase 1 clinical and non-clinical studies, with results indicating its safety and rapid and robust immune responses.
In March 2023, the International AIDS Vaccination Initiative (IAVI) announced that the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), part of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Strategic Preparedness and Response Administration of the United States, funded the development and additional testing of IAVI’s single-dose vaccine against Marburg virus and Ebola virus.
Second statementIAVI vaccines are based on the same recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus (rVSV) vector used in ERVEBO, Merck’s Ebola immunizer, registered for use in several African countries.
Most recently, researchers at the University of Oxford announced the first human trial for their ChAdOx1 Marburg vaccine. Second statement46 people aged between 18 and 55 will take part in the study, which will be led by the Oxford Vaccine Group.
“This Oxford trial is a first step towards developing a safe and effective vaccine to protect people from future outbreaks,” says Teresa Lambe OBE, lead scientific researcher on the study and professor of vaccinology at the Oxford Vaccine Group and the University’s Pandemic Sciences Institute. of Oxford, in the statement.
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This content was originally published in Virus Marburg: see which vaccines are in development on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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