Ebola outbreak: Why has 'Big Pharma' failed deadly virus' victims?

The scientist leading Britain's response
to the Ebola pandemic has launched a devastating attack on "Big Pharma", accusing drugs giants including GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Sanofi, Merck and Pfizer of failing to manufacture a vaccine, not because it was impossible, but because there was "no business case"West Africa's Ebola outbreak, which has now claimed well over 2,000 lives, could have been "nipped in the bud", if a vaccine had been developed and stockpiled sooner – a feat that would likely have been "do-able", said Professor Adrian Hill of Oxford University.

A team led by Professor Hill is to begin trials of an experimental Ebola vaccine fast-tracked into development in a desperate bid to slow the spread of the virus in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. If it passes safety and effectiveness trials, 10,000 doses of the vaccine – co-developed by the Britain's GSK and America's National Institutes of Health (NIH) – could be used to protect health workers in West Africa by December.

However, Professor Hill said that the fact that a vaccine had not been available to stop the disease when it emerged in Guinea six months ago represented a "market failure" of the commercial system of vaccine production which is dominated by the pharmaceutical giants.

The scale of the Ebola outbreak and the devastation it is causing in terms of lives lost and social breakdown had led the World Health Organisation (WHO) to order an unprecedented acceleration of normal drug development processes.

Experts are looking at 10 different unlicensed and experimental Ebola therapy and vaccine candidates, of which the GSK/NIH vaccine is among the most promising. Regulatory processes that usually take up to 15 years have been abandoned, to fast-track drugs and vaccines into the field.