First volunteer receives experimental Ebola vaccine in Oxford trial

A 37-year-old British man has become the first person in the world to receive an experimental vaccine targeting the Ebola virus in a new clinical trial conducted in Oxford.

Ed Hunt, the first of 50 healthy volunteers aged between 18 and 55 to be recruited, said he was motivated to participate after following reports of the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“I had wanted to volunteer for the Covid vaccine trial but was unable to because of work commitments. After seeing news from DR Congo, I thought I'd like to do my bit,” Hunt told the BBC.

The vaccine was developed in just eight weeks by scientists in Oxford and is based on the same platform used in the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, which was administered to hundreds of millions of people during the pandemic.

The candidate vaccine targets the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, which is responsible for the current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. While a licensed vaccine exists for the Zaire strain of the virus, it is not effective against the Bundibugyo variant.

Researchers say this is the first of four vaccines under development for the Bundibugyo strain to enter human trials.

Further studies are already planned, including a second small-scale trial in Uganda, followed by a larger efficacy trial in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Serum Institute of India has preemptively manufactured 600,000 doses of the Oxford-developed vaccine, which could be deployed rapidly if the trials prove successful.

According to available data, the outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has resulted in more than 2,500 confirmed cases and just over 1,000 deaths.

By Tamilla Hasanova