To fight recurring, deadly Ebola outbreaks in parts of Africa, healthcare workers have given vaccines to more than 100,000 people.
However, anti-Ebola vaccines are barely out of the experimental stage. Nobody knows if they can provide long-term protection across a broad population. And nobody has understood the effect of these vaccines on the immune system.
A research lab from Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science recently joined forces with a research team in Cologne, Germany, to uncover the details of the molecular response that occurs in the immune system after vaccination against Ebola.
Their findings may help health organizations devise better strategies for containing and preventing the disease, which currently has no cure, and kills around 50 percent of those infected.
“These vaccines — made by recombinant methods that attach an Ebola protein to a harmless virus — are hard to produce, and thus there is not enough of them to vaccinate an entire population,” said structural biologist Ron Diskin of the Weizmann Institute.
Furthermore, he added, the vaccines rarely reach remote villages that where they are needed most. They tend to be given only to people most closely connected to individuals who are already sick.
“Understanding exactly how the immune response is produced following vaccination will not only help refine the vaccine. It can help us understand whether it will work against different strains of the virus or whether the dose given today is the best one,” said Diskin.
Immune memory
The study began in the lab of immunologist Dr. Florian Klein of the University of Cologne. Klein and his group looked for signs of the immune response in blood samples from six people who had received the vaccine a year or more earlier….
Read full text at Israel21c
Photo Credit: UK Department for International Development at Flickr
