SMHS-Led Clinical Trial To Assess Immunogenicity and Safety of Lassa Fever Vaccine

A vaccine for Lassa fever may be on the horizon, thanks to a new clinical trial jointly led by Elissa Malkin, DO, MPH, assistant research professor of medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. With an award from trial sponsor IAVI, Malkin, along with collaborators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Redemption Hospital in Monrovia, Liberia, and East-West Medical Research Institute in Honolulu, Hawaii, will be testing IAVI’s experimental vaccine candidate called “rVSV∆G-LASV-GPC,” a recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus (rVSV) vector-based vaccine expressing a Lassa virus protein (LASV-GPC).