An Ebola vaccine being developed by British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline has been deemed safe enough to be trialled soon. Healthy individuals in West African countries, where the virus has rampaged, will be the first to participate.

In an announcement reported by the Associated Press, Marie-Paule Kieny, the assistant director general of Health Systems and Innovation at the World Health Organization, revealed that both the GSK vaccine and one licensed by Merck and NewLink, have "an acceptable safety profile."

According to Kieny, who is helping coordinate the hunt for an Ebola vaccine, six-month-long trials will begin in West Africa and health workers could be among the first to receive it. Doctors, nurses and volunteers continue to put themselves in harm's way everyday in affected areas of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, with WHO revealing this week that around 800 have been infected since the outbreak. More than 8,000 people have died from the disease in total, including 500 health workers, and more than 20,000 have been infected.

A vaccine could not come soon enough, and the acceleration of research has been astounding, with teams working on a solution or conducting trials in the UK, the US, Germany, Russia, Kenya, Switzerland and beyond.

There were reports of NewLink's vaccine causing "mild" joint pain in the hands and feet, but this was ultimately deemed not serious enough to hold up research. GlaxoSmithKline's vaccine, being developed in conjunction with a biotechnology company it acquired and the National Institute of Health in the US, could be produced in the thousands—all going well—later this year.

Back in November, the British pharma published the results of its phase 1 trial in the New England Journal of Medicine. It showed that all 20 healthy volunteers exhibited an immunological response after the vaccine was administered. The vaccine itself has been developed from chimpanzee adenovirus type 3—essentially a cold virus. This was modified to carry genetic information from two strains of the Ebola virus. Alongside this, GSK is also working on a one-strain vaccine, which focuses on the Zaire strain, prevalent today in West Africa.

Trials in the UK are being funded in part by the Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council and the UK Government, and GSK is already looking into options for largescale manufacturing of the vaccine if it proves successful.

The UK's Wellcome Trust has separately made a set of pledges to help fund Ebola research, committing £40m in funding to various initiatives. These include research investigations covering diagnosis, diseases control, ethics and protection; experimental therapies and vaccines for Ebola; and the launch of a new group called Developing Excellence in Leadership, Training and Science Africa (DELTAS Africa), designed to help advance homegrown research in sub-Saharan Africa.

In addition to this strong Ebola research presence in the UK, a vaccine engineered using a human cold virus and the smallpox virus has begun testing in the UK. Developed by Johnson & Johnson, it's at phase 1 and so a little behind the others. But it holds promise, having been shown to provide monkeys with protection against the Zaire strain. 72 healthy volunteers will receive a dose.