BARDA awards $10 million to company developing Marburg virus vaccine

Public Health Vaccines just received $10 million from the federal Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to develop a vaccine to protect against Marburg virus. The vaccine was designed by and licensed from the Public Health Agency of Canada, employing the same approach as the Ebola vaccine currently being used in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. No licensed vaccine for the disease exists today. Even though it has been more than a dozen years since there has been a large Marburg outbreak, the virus can be as deadly as Ebola, a related disease. BARDA officials told STAT they don’t want a repeat of the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak, where there was no licensed vaccine available to deploy.