Emergent BioSolutions to team its Ebola vaccine with GSK's in Phase I

Emergent BioSolutions has completed the manufacture of the first clinical lot of a modified vaccinia Ankara (MVA) Ebola Zaire vaccine candidate (MVA EBOZ) that will be used in a Phase I trial together with GlaxoSmithKline's Chimp Adenovirus type 3 (ChAd3) Ebola vaccine candidate as a heterologous boost. The Phase I study will be conducted in the UK at the Jenner Institute in Oxford, supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust and the UK Department for International Development. Under several agreements that it signed with the University of Oxford, GSK, and the US National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Emergent has performed proof of concept work and manufactured the MVA EBOZ vaccine candidate at a 200L scale in an avian cell line. Manufacturing in this cell line has significant advantages including removing the requirement for eggs from the manufacturing process, consistency of manufactured vaccine lots, and increases in doses delivered, the company said. The scalable process has the potential to meet the demand for multi-million doses in a few months.

Related stories