Clinical trial to start soon on GSK Ebola vaccine

A clinical trial of an experimental vaccine against the deadly Ebola virus is set to start shortly, according to British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline , which is co-developing the product with U.S. scientists.
The world's worst outbreak of Ebola has killed nearly 1,000 people in West Africa and the disease could continue spreading for months, increasing pressure on researchers to accelerate their work on new medical interventions, Reuters reported.
There is no proven cure or vaccine to prevent infection with Ebola and the scale of the current outbreak has prompted the World Health Organisation to declare it an international health emergency.
GSK's experimental vaccine has already produced promising results in animal studies involving primates and it is now due to enter initial Phase I testing in humans, pending approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
A company spokeswoman said on Sunday that the trial should get underway 'later this year', while GSK's partner the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) said in a statement on its website it would start 'as early as fall 2014', implying a potential September launch of testing.