EU puts up almost €25 million for Ebola research

The European Commission on Thursday announced funding worth €24.4 million for research to assist in containing the Ebola health crisis ravaging one of the poorest corners of Africa.

The funding will go to five projects, ranging from a large-scale clinical trial of a potential vaccine, coordinated by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), to testing the safety of experimental vaccine candidates to treat Ebola.

The money will flow from Horizon 2020, the European Union’s seven-year, €80 billion research programme, as part of “a fast-track procedure,” according to a statement from the Commission.

José Manuel Barroso, in one of his last acts as President of the European Commission, called it "a race against time.” The funding will be made available, he said, to “speed up some of the most promising research to develop vaccines and treatments."

Peter Piot, Director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and one of the discoverers of Ebola, reacted positively to the news. "I very much welcome the Commission's decisive action to support a series of clinical trials and studies on the Ebola virus,” he said.

The EMA steps in

At the same time, the European Medicines Agency said on October 22 that it would be fast-tracking promising Ebola treatments through its regulatory review process. “Companies are expected to put efforts into demonstrating that vaccines and treatments against Ebola actually work and are acceptably safe and of high quality, because we need to be reassured that the benefits of these medicines outweigh their risks,” said Tomas Salmonson, Chair of the Agency’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP), in a statement. “However, in the current emergency situation we accept that the benefit-risk balance is determined largely by the public health need.”

The set of EU actions this week reflects a belated, but accelerating, response to the crisis in Brussels. Internal wrangling among the member-states has been a frequent problem, with Britain, France and other former colonial powers in West Africa staking out their own policies – and, some EU officials say, hampering fast, coordinated EU-level action. This has been a problem, for instance, in organising air rescue and some other emergency medical care. For the Horizon 2020 actions, EU officials had started working on them some weeks ago – but as recently as last week it wasn’t certain when or how they could be announced publicly, due to lengthy consultations with member-states. 

There is currently no proven vaccine against the deadly disease and drug companies have been cautious in the past about pouring resources into Ebola since previous outbreaks have been small. "One of the most important messages is that we need to step up medical research on Ebola," said Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the EU Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation.

Fatality rates during Ebola outbreaks are high. West Africa's outbreak began in March and has killed nearly 5,000 people, most of them in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, according to the World Health Organisation. Outbreaks in Senegal and Nigeria have been declared over by the WHO and there have been a scattering of cases in Spain and the United States.

In addition to providing funding, EU leaders are expected to appoint a coordinator on Ebola during a meeting of prime ministers in Brussels on 23-24 October.

The medical trials

The GSK trial, which is working on a drug based on a chimpanzee-cold virus, is generally seen as one of the most promising in the world and was therefore granted the highest amount of funding. The drug is made in Rixensart, Belgium, and entered phase I human trials on 2 September, according to GSK.

The Commission received project proposals under an expedited procedure; not with the usual call for proposals. These were evaluated in the usual way by a panel of experts – seven in total in this instance.

The budget is mainly drawn from contributions the Commission receives from so-called third countries. The Commission expects to sign grant agreements and make first payments before the end of the year, and possibly before the end of November. Projects may begin work sooner, and in some cases the Commission is supporting work already ongoing.

The Ebola projects to be funded