CEPI (the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) awarded US$4.17 million on 20 August to four projects testing whether immune responses raised by Zaire-species Ebola vaccines recognise Bundibugyo virus1. The studies read stored blood from people already vaccinated, which is why the money is small and the timeline short. A project led by the University of California, Los Angeles covers more than 1,700 participants and about 1,800 serum samples. A second, at the Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp, covers more than 600 participants and will transfer its laboratory methods to DR Congo's Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale, so the assay ends up in the country running the outbreak.
CEPI expects the first Antwerp antibody results in two to six months. Counted from the award, the earliest of those answers lands in late October. The treatment trial already running in Ituri tests therapeutics rather than vaccines, so it cannot answer the cross-protection question either.
Every item on this list reports out after the outbreak that prompted it, which reads like a failure and mostly is not one. A serology study cannot be commissioned faster than the samples can be shipped and the assays validated, and the question it answers, whether one species' vaccine covers another, keeps its value long after the current epidemic curve turns. For a species that has surfaced roughly once a decade, evidence arriving in late October is an argument for building the platform between outbreaks rather than during them.
