A scientist leading Britain's response to Ebola epidemic has reportedly attacked big pharmaceutical companies for failing to manufacture a vaccine not because it was impossible but because there was "no business case."
Professor Adrian Hill of Oxford University, who is leading a team of researchers who will soon begin trials of an experimental Ebola vaccine to contain the epidemic, said that if a vaccine had been developed and stockpiled sooner, the disease could have been "nipped in the bud," reported The Independent.
The scientist said that big pharmaceutical companies like, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Sanofi, Merck and Pfizer, refused to develop vaccines because the market for such vaccines wasn't big. There was no business case for developing Ebola vaccine for the people who needed it the most- firstly because of the nature of the outbreak; secondly, the number of people affected was not high and lastly, the people affected by the disease belonged to some of the poorest countries of the world and could not afford to pay for a new vaccine, he said.
The vaccine developed by Professor Hill's team and Britain's GSK and America's National Institutes of Health (NIH) will be used to protect health workers in Africa by December if it passes safety and effectiveness trials.
Ebola has claimed over 2,000 lives so far. The scale of the outbreak has prompted the World Health Organization (WHO) to expedite the normal drug development processes.
An experimental drug ZMapp, developed by Mapp, a small pharmaceutical firm in the United States, has been used to treat seven patients earlier and has demonstrated promising results in trials on primates.
