Vaccine shelved for 10 years

Canadian and U.S. scientists developed a vaccine almost 10 years that was 100% effective in protecting monkeys against the virus, publishing their results in Nature and saying a product could be ready for licensing by 2010 or 2011, but the vaccine was shelved due to the lack of market opportunities. It is now undergoing basic safety tests in humans after falling into what an expert calls a ‘biotech valley of death’, where no drug company would help bring it to production. One of the vaccine developers:

There’s never been a big market for Ebola vaccines. So big pharma, who are they going to sell it to? It takes a crisis sometimes to get people talking. ‘O.K. We’ve got to do something here.’