by Rachel Chu1
The current Ebola crisis has caught the international healthcare community unawares. Among the top concerns of policymakers, and the world, is the availability of treatments and vaccines that would cure affected patients and cut off the chain of transmission.2 Without as much as a single product ready for deployment, international institutions, nations, research organizations and biopharmaceutical companies are scrambling to finish the development of potential vaccines and scale up manufacturing and distribution. Clinical trials, or testing candidates' safety and efficacy in human volunteers, represent one of the most fundamental components of this process, yet at the same time the most costly and time-consuming. The first deployable vaccines are not expected to be ready until mid 20153 - although the compounds themselves have been developed, they must first undergo testing in healthy volunteers and then extensive testing among infected populations in order to ensure they are safe and effective for wide scale use. In other words, the candidates had already been developed and tested in the laboratory prior to the outbreak of the pandemic, but not taken to the key phase of human testing.
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