The World Health Organization (WHO) has announced that there should be millions of experimental Ebola vaccines produced by the end of next year.
Doctors treating Ebola patients in West Africa may be able to receive the experimental drug by December 2015.
However, the WHO warned that an experimental Ebola vaccine might not have enough effect to end the Ebola epidemic. The vaccine would not be guaranteed to stop someone from becoming infected.
In 2005, scientists developed an experimental Ebola vaccine that was 100 percent effective against the disease in monkeys. That vaccine had been sitting on a shelf never receiving a clinical trial in humans until now.
Drug companies may be reluctant to test vaccines for diseases that only affect people in poor countries because testing a drug is very expensive, and poorer people would likely be unable to pay enough to make the drug profitable. Besides that, until this epidemic, Ebola outbreaks tended to die out quickly.
"There's never been a big market for Ebola vaccines. So big pharma, who are they going to sell it to? It takes a crisis sometimes to get people talking. 'O.K. We've got to do something here,' " said Thomas W. Geisbert, one of the researchers who developed the Ebola vaccine that was effective in monkeys.
Now that this outbreak is so widespread, the WHO placed Ebola vaccines on a fast track for testing in light of the fast spread of the epidemic.
There are a total of 9,935 cases of Ebola so far, with 4,877 dead from the disease, which kills more than half of its victims. Health officials fear that Ebola will eventually spread to other parts of the world if more is not done to stop it.
The first case of Ebola in New York City was confirmed on Oct. 23 in emergency physician Craig Spencer, a man who treated Ebola in West Africa. Two people in Texas tested positively for Ebola, one of whom died.
GlaxoSmithKline is testing two experimental Ebola vaccines in Mali, the United States and United Kingdom. The Canadian vaccine, which Geisbert helped develop, may go into safety testing in humans soon as well.
The researchers need to determine whether the vaccines are safe for human use, what an accurate dose would be to prevent infection, and how effective the vaccine would be.
Once the vaccine is ready for further use, the WHO will prioritize vaccinating healthcare professionals who are treating Ebola in other countries.
