Safety trials of experimental drug at University of Oxford offers hope in west Africa, where virus has killed 53% of those infected

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

A healthy Briton is to become the first person to receive a potential new vaccine for the Ebola virus.

The volunteer will be given the inoculation in a safety trial that experts at the University of Oxford are conducting.

The person will be the first of 60 to receive the experimental drug in the UK trial.

The testing is part of a series of trials of potential vaccines to combat the deadly virus, which could offer hope to the thousands at risk of infection in west Africa, where an outbreak has killed around 53% of those infected.

The vaccine, co-developed by the US National Institutes of Health and British drug company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), targets the Zaire species of Ebola, one of the strains circulating in west Africa.

It uses a single benign Ebola virus protein to generate an immune response. The university said the vaccine did not contain infectious material and would not cause a person taking part in the trial to be infected.

The trials are conducted on healthy people to see whether they suffer any side effects.