Ebola vaccine's triumph will lead to reward for Ames company

An Iowa vaccine company is basking in the news that a product it helped develop can stop one of the world’s deadliest viruses.

A study published Thursday showed that the vaccine is 100 percent effective in protecting people from Ebola, an extremely infectious virus that has killed thousands and terrorized millions, mainly in Africa.

NewLink Genetics, based in Ames, helped test and refine an Ebola vaccine that was invented by Canadian scientists. The new study, published in the British medical journal The Lancet, shows the shots protect people who might have come in contact with an infected person.

Thomas Monath, NewLink’s chief scientific officer for infectious diseases, said Friday that the vaccine’s success should mean the world will never see another widespread Ebola epidemic. “There still will be outbreaks, but they’ll be controlled and contained rapidly,” he said.

NewLink Ebola vaccine research awarded $18 million

The vaccine’s development was pushed ahead by a devastating epidemic that flared up in 2013 and 2014, starting in the west African countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Ebola causes intense fevers, bleeding, vomiting, muscle pain and fatigue. It kills about half of the people it infects.

In the study, public-health officials vaccinated people who had come in contact with a person infected with Ebola in Guinea or Sierra Leone. The shots were immediately given to nearly 4,000 people who might have been exposed to the virus. None came down with Ebola. A control group of 2,000 people were given the vaccine three weeks after their possible exposures. Sixteen of those people came down with the disease. Scientists concluded the test showed the vaccine is 100 percent effective. 

Monath said the results should lead to relatively quick licensing by the Food and Drug Administration, which would open the door to larger scale manufacturing of the vaccine. That could happen as soon as 2018, although he said the shots could be distributed and used before then on an emergency basis if another epidemic flares up.

The vaccine's development and testing were pushed ahead with hundreds of millions of dollars from government and private groups due to the record-setting outbreak and ensuing panic in 2014. Even though the United States only saw four cases, Americans watched in horror as news broadcasts brought video of Africans dying by the thousands. The coverage raised fears that the virus could spread around the globe. "The circumstances were so horrific. You move quickly and take bigger risks," Monath said. 

Monath doesn’t foresee broad use of the new vaccine to protect entire populations before the virus appears in a community. For one thing, he said, it isn’t yet clear how long the shots’ protection would last. Also, because the virus is rare, it would be hard to justify the cost of a huge vaccination campaign, he said. Instead, the vaccine would be kept at the ready, and used immediately to protect people in an area where a case has been reported.

NewLink has about 100 employees at its Ames headquarters. It also has offices in Texas and  Massachusetts. The company bought the rights to the Ebola vaccine from the Canadian government in 2010. It then licensed the vaccine to the medical industry giant Merck in 2014, bringing in about $50 million. NewLink has worked with Merck to continue developing and testing the shots.

Besides royalties, the small company stands to share in an unusual reward offered by the U.S. government, Monath said. The Food and Drug Administration offers a “priority review voucher” to companies that produce vaccines or treatments for rare or tropical diseases. Once such products are formally licensed by the government, the vouchers are awarded and can be used to obtain quick FDA review for future products. The vouchers can be sold to other companies, and can fetch $100 million to $300 million, Monath said. NewLink will share in that bounty with Merck once its vaccine is licensed by the government.

The income will be welcome news for a company that was hit with a financial blow earlier in the year. NewLink announced in June that it was laying off 87 people after a study showed that a treatment it was developing for pancreatic cancer didn’t work. The treatment was designed to boost the body’s immune system to fight cancer cells. The company remains committed to the general idea, called immunotherapy.