The story of how the Ebola vaccine went from the lab to rapid clinical trial in the midst of a catastrophic outbreak in West Africa to approval is ready for Steven Spielberg, as STAT writes it—but it’s also a startling reminder of how policy could thwart progress on future cures.
The news: On December 21, 2019, the FDA approved BIO member Merck’s Ebola vaccine, Ervebo, following clinical trials during the recent outbreaks in West Africa, reported NBC News.
It’s a story made for the big screen: STAT takes you from the labs where passionate scientists were unable to get funding when Ebola wasn’t considered a major threat in the 1990s, to the researcher who pricked her finger and got the first untested vaccine in 2005, to the World Health Organization’s initial rejection of the vaccine when the outbreak started in Guinea in 2013 to, eventually, the trials in the field as the disease ravaged West Africa.
And it’s a startling reminder of the difficulty of developing new vaccines: “The reality was that, for years, scientists who studied Ebola…had poured their hearts into work to develop vaccines and drugs to combat these deadly scourges. And for years, they had seen promising work smash up against unscalable walls. There was no potential for drug makers to recoup development costs; and, with outbreaks only sporadic, there was little opportunity to subject experimental vaccines to rigorous tests.”
But biopharma stepped up when WHO accepted the vaccine and needed a partner for the trial: Merck purchased the license for $50 million and oversaw the trials that led to the approval and saved thousands of lives.
But this extraordinary science and investment might be impossible in the future. If policymakers enact drug price controls that threaten the research pipeline and the biopharmaceutical economy, we’ll miss out on potentially dozens of new cures in the next two decades—perhaps even the next groundbreaking vaccine.
For more on how proposed policies could threaten the next Ebola vaccine, visit www.bio.org/save-cures.
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