Ebola vaccine from Johnson & Johnson proves promising

An experimental Ebola vaccine from Johnson & Johnson, boosted by a second immunization shot from biotechnology company Bavarian Nordic, generated a powerful immune response among volunteers in its first tests in humans.

The novel approach may provide durable protection against the deadly virus that swept across the West African nations of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea in 2014, sickening almost 29,000 people and killing more than 11,000.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that 100 percent of people getting the one-two combination were still producing antibodies against the virus eight months later, a promising result for researchers looking for a vaccine against the infection that’s still generating clusters of disease.

The initial results don’t look significantly different from studies of potential rivals, including Merck’s experimental Ebola vaccine, said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which helped discover J&J’s vaccine, called AdVac.

Eight months after the vaccine, all the patients who received it were still producing antibodies against Ebola, and the majority were making immune system T-cells that could kill Ebola-infected cells to prevent them from replicating.

The research was funded in part by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and grants from a European consortium that includes the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, the University of Oxford and the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research.