Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Ebolavirus (EBOV) has caused devastating disease since its discovery, primarily in Africa with a death rate reaching up to 90%. It has also drawn increasing global attention due to frequent detection of natural human outbreaks and its suitability as a bio-weapon if released into the public. The emergence of a new EBOV strain during November 2007 in Uganda suggests that the virus is evolving. While vaccines are promising preventative measures available against EBOV, there are currently no immunization protocols clinically approved for human use. Human adenovirus-based vaccine (AdHu5) is efficacious against EBOV infection, however clinical development has been hampered by the fact that many individuals have neutralizing antibodies against AdHu5 and thus render the vaccine ineffective. The goal of this project is to produce a pig adenovirus-based vaccine (PAV3) against EBOV. Our group has recently developed a new vaccine component that increases the EBOV vaccine efficacy by 100-fold. In addition, our group and others have determined that the level of neutralizing antibodies to pig adenovirus is below the detection limit in the human population. Based on previous findings, we hypothesize that a PAV3-based vaccine will give stronger and faster protection against EBOV than the AdHu5 vaccine, leading to protection even after infection. Reasons explaining enhanced protection will be investigated in detail in order to help establish fundamental principles of vaccine design that can be applied against other infectious diseases in the future.