Expert review of vaccines
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For 40 years ebolaviruses have been responsible for sporadic outbreaks of severe and often fatal hemorrhagic fever in humans and nonhuman primates. In December 2013 an unprecedented Zaire ebolavirus epidemic began in West Africa. ⋯ There has been remarkable progress using a variety of platforms including DNA, subunit, and several viral vector approaches, replicating and non-replicating, which have shown varying degrees of protective efficacy in the "gold-standard" nonhuman primate models for Ebolavirus infections. A number of these vaccine platforms have moved into clinical trials over the past year with the hope of finding an efficacious vaccine to prevent future outbreaks/epidemics of Ebola hemorrhagic fever on the scale of the West African epidemic.