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An
outbreak of the Ebola virus in West Africa has killed around 53% of those
infected
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A
healthy Briton is to become the first person to receive a potential new vaccine
for the Ebola virus, Press Association reports.
The
UK volunteer will be given the candidate inoculation in a safety trial being
conducted by experts at the University of Oxford.
The
person will be the first of 60 to receive the experimental drug in the UK
trial.
The
testing is part of a series of safety trials of potential vaccines to combat
the virus, which could offer hope to the thousands facing the illness in West
Africa where an outbreak has killed around 53% of those infected.
The
vaccine, co-developed by the US National Institutes of Health and British drug
company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), targets the "Zaire species" of Ebola
which is one of the strains circulating in West Africa.
It
uses a single benign Ebola virus protein to generate an immune response. The
university said the vaccine does not contain infectious Ebola virus material
and will not cause a person taking part in the trial to be infected.
The
trials are conducted on healthy people to see whether they suffer any side
effects.
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