Ebola vaccine plans to be speeded up for 2015

The World Health Organisation yesterday set out plans for speeding up development and deployment of experimental ebola vaccines, saying hundreds of thousands of doses should be ready for use in West Africa by the middle of 2015.

The UN health agency confirmed that two leading vaccine candidates are in human clinical trials, and said another five experimental vaccines were also being developed and would begin clinical trials next year.

“Before the end of the first half of 2015... we could have available a few hundred thousand doses. That could be 200,000, it could be less or could be more,” the , the WHO’s assistant director general for health systems and innovation Marie-Paule Kieny told reporters after a meeting in Geneva of industry executives, global health experts, drug regulators, and funders.