Researchers at the University of Â鶹´«Ã½ at ²ÑÄå²Ô´Ç²¹ (JABSOM) have demonstrated the efficacy in monkeys of multiple vaccine candidates targeting three filoviruses causing life-threatening infections to humans: Ebola virus, Sudan virus and Marburg virus. The new findings were published in on August 18.

Associate Professor Axel Lehrer of the leads the JABSOM team, working in collaboration on this project with late-stage biopharmaceutical company , and with the local development partner, Hawaii Biotech, Inc. The team also reported another breakthrough in demonstrating successful thermostabilization in single vials of Filovirus vaccines in (available online since August 13).

“Filoviruses are endemic in areas of the world where the power supply can be uncertain, making a thermostable vaccine particularly valuable,” said Lehrer. “Our work to date has demonstrated not only the feasibility of rapid and efficient manufacturing, but also the applicability of thermostabilization of multiple antigens with the potential for a broadly applicable and easily distributed vaccine.”

Lehrer’s work has focused on creating shelf-stable vaccines that require no refrigeration or freezing, which is key to eradicating viruses in tropical countries, and allows equitable distribution of much needed vaccines to communities around the globe.

• Related UH News story: Ebola vaccine developed by UH can withstand high heat, February 22, 2019

According to Lehrer, once developed, such a vaccine may be able to rapidly address emerging outbreaks, such as the infection that appeared in Guinea recently. The collaborators believe that this technology may be an important contribution to National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci’s proposed idea to against the top 20 viral families that may also cause pandemics.

“Having such a platform available would likely enable broader and faster worldwide vaccination campaigns addressing future health emergencies. In addition, the ability to combine antigens in the formulation also enables generation of potentially broader protective vaccines,” Lehrer said.

COVID-19 vaccine update

Since March 2020, Lehrer has also been working with Soligenix on a promising thermostable COVID-19 vaccine. “While much progress has been made since the initial announcement of our collaborative research, we are actively working on further analysis if the neutralizing potential of the vaccine candidate against a number of virus variants,” he said. The vaccine is being developed using the same thermostable platform that was used for filovirus vaccines and has demonstrated promising results in mice and non-human primates.

presenting the team’s findings has been published in Frontiers in Immunology in October 2020. A further publication is currently undergoing peer review and is

like this focused on preventing and curing infectious and emerging diseases, including COVID-19 (Account fund: #129-7310-4, ).

This research is an example of UH ²ÑÄå²Ô´Ç²¹â€™s goal of (PDF), one of four goals identified in the (PDF), updated in December 2020.

As confirmed COVID-19 cases continue to rise, the need for a vaccine to prevent the spread of the flu-like virus grows. University of Â鶹´«Ã½ at ²ÑÄå²Ô´Ç²¹ scientist Axel Lehrer is among those helping in that global fight. He is working in collaboration with New Jersey-based biopharmaceutical company to develop potential coronavirus vaccines, including one for the novel COVID-19 disease.

“Our platform has a good chance because the vaccine we’re producing is something that’s thermostable, can be produced in mass quantities and can be shipped everywhere without the need for refrigeration,” said Lehrer, an assistant professor at the . “That’s a huge benefit in an outbreak scenario where you need to be able to quickly ship vaccines around the world.”

Lehrer and his team of about a dozen lab colleagues in the have previously demonstrated the feasibility of developing an Ebola virus vaccine. Using the same technology platform, they are hopeful their development for a COVID-19 vaccine will also prove to be successful.

• Support UH COVID-19 research

In contrast to other coronavirus vaccines that use an RNA-based approach that is quicker to test in humans, the recombinant subunit vaccine Lehrer is developing takes a more conventional approach used for many proven vaccines currently on the market.

“We’re making antigen, the protein that will make you resistant to the virus. We make those antigens that will give a solid immune response. Our product will take between six to nine months to be ready for clinical trials, but the immune response you develop is much more potent (in comparison to RNA-based vaccines),” said Lehrer.

Lehrer believes the recombinant subunit vaccine is the right approach for COVID-19. “It can be used in any person, in immunocompromised people, in the elderly and in small children. The safety margin is very good and that’s why we believe it could be a major contribution to the field,” he said.

“It is rewarding to see ongoing work by JABSOM investigators and collaborators expanding on successful research on filovirus vaccines (protecting against viruses such as Ebola and Marburg virus) that may help us make unique life-saving contributions during this difficult time in healthcare,” said JABSOM Dean Jerris Hedges. “The prospect of a science lab in Â鶹´«Ã½ helping develop a vaccine amid the COVID-19 pandemic is a testament to the importance of local research in Â鶹´«Ã½.”

The next stage in the development process for the vaccine is to conduct test trials in small animals, which will commence in the next few weeks.

Along with Soligenix, Lehrer and his team are also working with , a Â鶹´«Ã½-based subunit vaccine developer.

Nine thousand miles from Â鶹´«Ã½, on the West African coast, the and the (UL) have begun a partnership with a global aim—to improve the world’s response to a future deadly infectious disease outbreak, whatever the contagion may be, or perhaps to quell an outbreak altogether.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has entered into a five-year, $2.5 million cooperative agreement grant with the two universities so that researchers in both countries may work together with the Liberian government to collect blood samples from all health districts across Liberia. The end goals are to establish a disease surveillance system and a database from which scientists hope to learn how survivors fought the deadly Ebola virus outbreak in Liberia. The results may even shed light on what other viruses may be circulating in this region of Africa.

“One thing that became obvious after the 2014–2015 outbreak was that the public health infrastructure in wide swaths of Africa, particularly in West Africa, is very weak, with very few doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals,” said Axel Lehrer, virologist at the UH ²ÑÄå²Ô´Ç²¹ (JABSOM) and principal investigator of the grant. “And then, unfortunately, there was a large loss of life among the medical professionals caring for the sick. This health emergency showed the danger emerging infectious diseases pose to the people there and to the global community, and how important it is to strengthen the local medical systems in order to prevent something like that from happening in the future.”

• More on Lehrer’s research: Ebola vaccine developed by UH can withstand high heat, February 22, 2019

With a long record of experience in global health, including work in Africa, the Tropics and the Americas to battle Malaria, Dengue, Ebola, Zika and other disease agents, JABSOM’s is well positioned to assist in the rebuilding of Liberia’s research and healthcare workforce.

“I’m really proud to say that our faculty have experience working in these countries,” said Vivek Nerurkar, chair of tropical medicine, medical microbiology and pharmacology at JABSOM. “We are hoping that in the next five to 10 years, Liberia will have its own staff and personnel who can man their hospitals as well as the teaching facilities.” Viral immunologist Wei-Kung Wang and epidemiologist Alan R. Katz are also part of the UH ²ÑÄå²Ô´Ç²¹ team.

Mobile medical labs

In January 2019, the UH research team and its collaborators delivered several state-of-the-art mobile medical labs to Liberia, where officials from the UL and the Liberian government held a ceremony to celebrate the scientific and healthcare collaboration. Also in attendance were representatives of Baylor College of Medicine, which designed and built these $1.5-million laboratories with funding from the Paul Allen Family Foundation and donated them to UL and the National Public Health Institute of Liberia.

Lehrer and his team know the task ahead will take years. But the rewards that may lie ahead hold promise for decades to come.

“We will collect a very large set of samples, large enough we hope that other researchers can also then draw upon them if they want to continue someday from where we leave off. And therefore, it will really put the University of Â鶹´«Ã½ in a position to help future generations, to be connected forever with this groundbreaking research that is going on in Africa,” said Lehrer.

Both Lehrer and Nerurkar are confident that the research and training of Liberian students will go smoothly due to a pilot project conducted in 2018. UH undergraduate and graduate students were deployed to Liberia in the summer of 2018 under a housed at the JABSOM tropical medicine department.

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• Related Â鶹´«Ã½News: Ebola virus research in Liberia part of Kapiʻolani CC professor’s mission, September 13, 2018

—By Tina Shelton

There is more positive news to report about the Ebola subunit vaccine candidate developed by University of Â鶹´«Ã½ at ²ÑÄå²Ô´Ç²¹ scientist Axel Lehrer. The potential vaccine remains viable in extreme heat conditions for several months, which is especially important where the disease outbreaks so far have begun in rural, spread-out areas of hot, dry West Africa.

In his scientific article, Lehrer demonstrates his vaccine can sustain immunogenicity, the ability to provoke an immune response in the body, after being stored at 104° F for up to 12 weeks.

“None of the other Ebola vaccines under development have the ability to withstand high temperatures, which is an ongoing concern in areas of the world where Filoviruses are endemic,” said Lehrer, an assistant professor in the at UH ²ÑÄå²Ô´Ç²¹â€™s John A. Burns School of Medicine.

“The ability to stabilize our vaccine candidate to retain immunogenicity may not only have an impact on logistics, but also has the potential to reach more persons in need with fewer vaccine doses. This would be a tremendous advantage, especially in endemic areas, increasing the number of people receiving sufficient doses of the vaccine to protect them from disease.”

Lehrer said he and his team are very encouraged by these preliminary results and look forward to their continuing collaborations with , a late-stage biopharmaceutical company based in New Jersey and Lehrer’s Â鶹´«Ã½-based Ebola subunit vaccine collaborator to further develop vaccines for Ebola and the filovirus.

The paper was published in the .

—By Tina Shelton

University of Â鶹´«Ã½ vaccine researcher Axel Lehrer, has received a $6.35 million grant to test whether the Ebola vaccine formula he has developed will protect against two additional viruses in the same family.

The Ebola vaccine that UH has created is “heat stable,” which means it does not need refrigeration, and could be easily transported and stored in the hottest climates on Earth, like Africa, where the deadly viruses have struck in the past. Expanding the heat-stable vaccine to work against all three of the related viruses could speed up the protection of health workers and others as soon as an outbreak occurs. The first inoculations could occur even before public health experts know which exact type of hemorrhagic fever has struck.

The is partnering with two biomedical companies—Honolulu-based Â鶹´«Ã½ Biotech, Inc. and New Jersey-based Soligenex, Inc.—to develop the potentially trivalent (works on all three viruses) vaccine. Other partners include the University of Texas Medical Branch and BIOQUAL, Inc.

“Filoviruses are endemic in areas of the world where the power supply can be uncertain, making a thermostable Ebola vaccine particularly valuable,” said Lehrer, an assistant professor the . “We are delighted to have been awarded this grant to further develop a thermostabilized subunit vaccine for Ebola and look forward to continuing our collaboration with Soligenix, and Â鶹´«Ã½ Biotech, Inc.”

Lehrer believes that when the new work funded by this grant is completed, the next step would be to obtain funding (perhaps a combination of public funding and corporate funding) to move the vaccine into a clinical trial.

With funding, and the necessary drug regulatory approvals, he believes his heat-stable vaccine candidate could be ready to be on the market within five to ten years.

For more go to the .

—By Tina Shelton

The University of Â鶹´«Ã½ is expanding its studies of a proposed vaccine for the deadly Ebola virus. A new grant of nearly $112,000 awarded to Liana Medina, a PhD candidate working with Assistant Professor Axel Lehrer at the (JABSOM) makes the additional work possible.

Lehrer’s promising vaccine candidate has already been proven effective in animal clinical studies. Under the grant from the to support minority scientists (Medina is of Hispanic heritage), Medina hopes to show the vaccine might protect against other deadly viruses related to Ebola.

“We are looking to see if our vaccine candidate can protect in other members in the filovirus family, viruses that are related to Ebola virus such as Marburg Virus and Sudan Virus,” said Medina.

“That would be hugely important in the case of a future outbreak in which we don’t know which virus will be infecting the populations,” said Lehrer of the .

Medina was invited to present her research at this summer’s American Society of Virology meeting in Madison, Wisconsin.

For more about the research, including a “Q and A” with the scientist, go to .

—By Tina Shelton

A biopharmaceutical company collaborating with Â鶹´«Ã½ scientists on an Ebola vaccine announced that tests on the vaccine, still in development, have shown it is able to retain its effectiveness without refrigeration. This is especially important for many rural areas in Africa that are most at-risk for another Ebola outbreak.

“What we’ve just recently shown with the work performed with Soligenix, Inc. at the University of Colorado is that we can dry stabilize the key antigen for the Ebola vaccine so that it basically can be stored at room temperature or elevated temperature—you can almost leave it out in the sun—and it can be stable for up to three months,” said Assistant Professor , at the University of Â鶹´«Ã½ at Mānoa .

The announcement was made by , Inc., which is a late-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing and commercializing products to treat rare diseases where there is an unmet medical need.

Collaboration for stability

The company is collaborating with UH Mānoa and (HBI). to develop a heat stable subunit Ebola vaccine. Soligenix said thermostabilization (heat stabilization) formulation studies, conducted with Theodore Randolph at the , have also shown that the use of thermostable formulations may allow full immunization to potentially be achieved with fewer vaccinations.

“None of the other Ebola vaccines under development have the ability to withstand high temperatures, which is an ongoing concern in areas of the world where Filoviruses are endemic,” said Lehrer. “The ability to stabilize our vaccine candidate to retain immunogenicity may not only have an impact on logistics, but has also the potential to reach more persons at need. A vaccine that needs to be given fewer times increases the likelihood that more people receive sufficient doses of the vaccine to protect them from disease.

“We are very encouraged by these preliminary results and look forward to our continuing collaboration with Soligenix and HBI to further develop our Ebola and multivalent filovirus vaccines.”

Read more about .

JABSOM video on Ebola vaccine discovery

—By Tina Shelton

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Kamuela Yong, together with colleagues at the National Science Foundation’s , published the paper in the . Through mathematical modeling, Yong and colleagues found that actions taken to halt the spread of the deadly virus may in fact increase transmission. His team focused on the spatial dynamics of ebola and the effects of the up to three-week incubation period before people begin experiencing symptoms.

“We found people’s behavior changes once the symptoms start happening,” said Yong. “If there are a lot of people with symptoms, the disease won’t spread, because people alter their behavior. They’re cautious.”

The paper findings are featured on the .

More about Kamuela Yong

Kamuela Yong is believed to be the first Native Hawaiian to earn a PhD in applied mathematics. His research is with mathematical models of ecological and epidemiological systems.

Read about Yong’s participation with Mathematical and Theoretical Biology Institute before and after obtaining his doctorate in the National Science Foundation post

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—By Julie Funasaki Yuen

“In order to say ‘never again’ to Ebola in West Africa, we need to understand the socio-cultural factors in Ebola’s acquisition and transmission.”
—Felix Ikuomola, doctor, Nigerian native, author of The Ebola Virus and West Africa: Medical and Sociocultural Aspects, published by on July 10, 2015

Felix I. Ikuomola, Liberia’s Physician of the Year in 2006, recounts his real-life experiences with Ebola while analyzing the influences of war, cultural traditions, politics and poverty in the spread of the disease in . Ikuomola is a researcher at the and a PhD candidate at the .

Ikuomola’s unique perspective allows the reader to appreciate how social conflicts, wars, corruption and bribery inhibited the creation of adequate public health facilities in West Africa, where life expectancy at the best of times is as low as 46 years old (Sierra Leone).

• Slideshow: August 27, 2015

“Most West African public health facilities do not have enough beds, medications, or functioning medical equipment,” Ikuomola writes, adding that many of the instruments in hospitals there are outdated and no longer relevant or useful.

Creating a traditional-healer program

His fascinating experiences include encounters with traditional healers who are frequently the first (and only) source of medical advice for citizens in rural parts of those countries where—perhaps not surprisingly—Ebola began its most recent spread to epidemic proportions and triggered a worldwide health scare.

“African traditional healers consult spirits through incantation, divination or via mediums,” Ikuomola writes. His text proposes the creation of a traditional-healer program to engage traditional healers, faith healers, herbalists and birth attendants in Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and his native Nigeria.

His idea is “to study what traditional healers know and what they are doing, so as to be able to advise them on safe traditional African medicinal practices.” He suggests nearby health facilities affiliate themselves with the traditional healers, allowing them to be classified as alternative medicine practitioners as is being done in China and other parts of the world where population far exceeds medical workers.

Ikuomola also reports the viral hemorrhagic fever is worsened in West Africa by an “academic hemorrhagic syndrome” that has left the region even more vulnerable to Ebola. “West Africa witnessed an exodus of…health workers abroad before the Ebola crises and the outbreaks led some of the remaining West African health workers to their untimely deaths. There is no way a society can survive with reduced numbers of qualified doctors and such a colossal disease as Ebola. It is no wonder that it did not take an eye’s blink before Ebola outran the capacity of the West African medical team.”

More about the book

The Ebola Virus and West Africa: Medical and Sociocultural Aspects provides a compact summary of the Ebola virus, outlining its nature, history, epidemiology and methods of treatment. In addition, the work examines the context of the disease’s outbreak by describing the people, politics and policies in West Africa before, during and after the recent outbreak. Finally, chapters summarize and explore the ethical issues that arise in pursuing treatments and discuss methods for improving control and prevention of additional outbreaks.

The book will provide a highly organized, comprehensive and insightful treatment of this virulent disease and its sociocultural elements to people with medical backgrounds and to individuals desiring to understand more comprehensively the impact of this disease on West Africa.

In either case, time spent with The Ebola Virus and West Africa will give you the background and analysis you need to respond intelligently to the challenges the virus presents to an increasingly globalized culture.

Read more about Ikuomola and The Ebola Virus and West Africa: Medical and Sociocultural Aspects on the .

—By Tina Shelton

, a biopharmaceutical company, is joining with Axel Lehrer at the John A. Burns School of Medicine and to develop a heat stable Ebola vaccine.

• Related: May 20, 2015

The ultimate goal is to produce a thermostable Ebola vaccine for worldwide distribution that does not require cold storage. ThermoVax, a -licensed technology, has been successful in enhancing the thermostability of both ricin (RiVax) and anthrax (VeloThrax) subunit vaccines in the past. Application of ThermoVax for the Ebola vaccine may allow for a product that can avoid the need for cold-chain distribution and storage, yielding a vaccine ideal for use in both the developed and developing world

“There is a great need for a thermostable Ebola vaccine, particularly in areas of the world where Filoviruses are endemic and the power supply uncertain,” stated Lehrer. “We are delighted to pursue this feasibility work with Soligenix and look forward to a long and productive collaboration.”

“We believe that creating a vaccine with enhanced stability at elevated temperatures, which can obviate the costs and logistical burdens associated with cold chain storage and distribution, has the potential to provide a distinct advantage over other Ebola vaccines currently in development,” stated Christopher J. Schaber, Soligenix president and chief executive officer.

For the full story go the the University of Â鶹´«Ã½ at Mānoa .

—By Tina Shelton