Section: Application Domains

The case of Ebola vaccine development

In response to the recent outbreak of Ebola virus disease in West Africa, the clinical development of some candidate to Ebola vaccine has been accelerated. Several vectors, mostly encoding glycoprotein of the virus, were tested in Phase I-II studies in order to assess their safety and immunogenicity. One of the main question of interest there is the antibody response induced by vaccination, as some non-human primates studies have shown protection against the virus when antibody levels were high enough. Although bridging studies still have to be developed, antibodies are thus considered as a criterium of interest. The challenge is then to evaluate the durability of the antibody response, whether it be at an individual or population level, in order to evaluate the impact of a vaccine strategy in case of an epidemic. Moreover, we are interested in the factors associated to this antibody response, and even more the other immune markers (from both innate and adaptative immune response) able to predict antibody levels. As those relationship are non-linear, sophisticated statistical and mathematical methods are developed in order to address these questions. A systems medicine approach using multidimensional immunogenicity data from clinical trials and statistical models can help to understand vaccine mechanisms and improve the selection of optimised vaccine strategies for clinical trials.