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An experimental Ebola vaccine is ready to be tested in West Africa after it proved successful in tests on 60 British volunteers, scientists have announced.
The £2.8million fast-track trial found the vaccine generated immune responses and boosted levels of antibodies in the 28 days after vaccination.
Prof Adrian Hill, who led the trial at the Jenner Institute at Oxford University, said: “The results are very encouraging.
"We have seen an immune response in the great majority of people receiving the vaccine. Larger trials in West Africa will be able to tell us more.”
The first doses for use in West Africa have already been delivered to Liberia.
The new vaccine uses a single Ebola virus gene and as it does not contain infectious virus material it cannot infect the person who is receiving it.
Prof Hill said two of the “guinea pigs” had experienced a moderate fever within 24 hours of receiving the vaccine but that had passed within a day.
More than 8,500 people have died in West Africa since the outbreak of the virus in 2013.
The candidate Ebola vaccine is being co-developed by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and GSK against the Zaire strain of Ebola, which is the one circulating in West Africa.
Last week Ebola nurse Pauline Cafferkey was discharged from hospital.
The 39-year-old Scot had spent more than three weeks in hospital battling the deadly disease after she caught it while working in Sierra Leone.
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