Another Marburg vaccine candidate reaches human trials
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Key takeaways:
- The Oxford Vaccine Group recruited 46 patients aged 18 to 55 years to participate in the trial.
- There are currently no approved treatments or vaccines for Marburg virus.
The University of Oxford announced recently that researchers initiated the first-in-human trial of a Marburg virus vaccine to test its safety and evaluate its immune response among a young, healthy population.
The vaccine, ChAdOx1, was developed and manufactured by researchers at the university, according to a press release. The Oxford Vaccine Group, which is leading the study, recruited 46 healthy individuals aged 18 to 55 years to participate in the trial. The participants underwent a rigorous screening process and will be monitored by health care professionals throughout the trial.
The UK Vaccine Network, a part of the Department of Health and Social Care that helps to develop vaccines for diseases with epidemic potential in low- and middle-income countries, is funding the research.
Although there are no available vaccines or treatments for Marburg virus, there are several experimental vaccines in testing, including one developed by researchers at the NIH, which entered human trials last year.
“With no approved treatments for Marburg, developing a vaccine is critical,” Teresa Lambe, OBE, lead scientific investigator of the ChAdOx1 trial and professor of vaccinology at Oxford Vaccine Group and the University of Oxford’s Pandemic Sciences Institute, said in the release. “This Oxford trial is a first step toward developing a safe and effective vaccine to protect people from future outbreaks.”
Marburg virus, which is a member of the same family as Ebola virus, was first identified in 1967. Since then, Marburg outbreaks have occurred across sub-Saharan Africa — the last two in Tanzania and Equatorial Guinea in 2023, according to the release.
Marburg virus has only recently been identified in West Africa for the first time, causing outbreaks in Guinea in 2021 and Ghana in 2022. Those outbreaks occurred after researchers reported finding the virus in West African bats for the first time.
“Marburg virus disease is one of the diseases designated by WHO as a priority disease for research and development, and it is also listed as a high-consequence infectious disease by the UK Health Security Agency,” Lambe said.
Based on previous outbreaks, Marburg has an estimated case fatality rate as high as 88%, Lambe added. It can cause hemorrhagic fever and encephalitis, making it highly virulent, and it is transmitted through direct contact and bodily fluids, making health care workers the most likely population to get infected.
These factors make the development of an effective vaccine crucial, according to Lambe.
Perspective
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Marburg virus disease is a rare but severe viral hemorrhagic fever, usually found in sub-Saharan Africa. The virus kills 20% to 90% of the people who become infected. So, a vaccine for Marburg virus would be extremely useful to help protect people from this deadly, emerging disease.
Because of changing environments and human-animal interactions, we expect to see more instances of Marburg virus spilling over from the animal that maintains it in nature — the Egyptian fruit bat — into people in surrounding communities. The Egyptian fruit bat is found across Africa, the Middle East, the Mediterranean and the Indian subcontinent, putting millions of people at potential risk for Marburg infections.
Just last year, the CDC and international partners responded to outbreaks in Equatorial Guinea and Tanzania, two countries where Marburg had never been seen before. A future vaccine could be used to control outbreaks and protect frontline health care workers, much like we do with the Ebola vaccine that protects against Zaire ebolavirus.
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