GENEVA, Oct 28 (Reuters) - Switzerland's drug regulator saidon Tuesday it had approved the testing of an experimental Ebolavaccine from GlaxoSmithKline on healthy volunteers, someof whom will be travelling to West Africa as medical staff.
The trial will be conducted among 120 volunteer participantsat the Lausanne University Hospital, with support from the WorldHealth Organization.
The volunteers, who include many medical students, will bemonitored for six months to determine both the safety andefficacy of the vaccine. There is a small control group ofvolunteers among them who will be given a placebo.
"Fifty front-line humanitarian workers going into the fieldwill receive the vaccine. The other 70 are not being deployedand of those 20 will receive the placebo and 50 the vaccine,"said hospital spokesman Darcy Christen.
"Volunteers going into the field will not receive theplacebo, for ethical reasons."
There are currently no proven drugs or vaccines for Ebolabut drugmakers, with backing from governments and donors, hopeto produce millions of vaccine doses in 2015 by fast-trackingthe normal lengthy development process.
GSK has estimated it might be able to make about 1 milliondoses of its vaccine a month by December 2015.
The GSK vaccine, which is already undergoing safety tests inBritain, the United States and Mali, is one of two leadingvaccine candidates now in early human testing.
The University Hospital of Geneva is to test the othervaccine from NewLink Genetics on a similar number ofvolunteers, after vials of that vaccine arrived in Geneva lastweek.
Results from these and other early trials will provide thebasis for planning larger studies, involving thousands of participants, and for choosing vaccine dose-level for suchefficacy trials. (Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; writing by Ben HirschlerEditing by Jeremy Gaunt)
Glaxosmithkline (GSK)