The University of Hawaii is expanding its studies of a proposed vaccine for the deadly Ebola virus.
A new grant of nearly $112,000 was recently awarded to Liana Medina, a Ph.D. candidate working with Assistant Professor Axel Lehrer at the John A. Burns School of Medicine.
Lehrer’s vaccine candidate has already been proven effective in animal clinical studies. Under the grant from the National Institutes of Health to support minority scientists, Medina hopes to show the vaccine might protect against other deadly viruses related to Ebola.
“We are looking to see if our vaccine candidate can protect in other members in the filovirus family, viruses that are related to Ebola virus such as Marburg Virus and Sudan Virus,” she said. “That would be hugely important in the case of a future outbreak in which we don’t know which virus will be infecting the populations.”
Medina was invited to present her research at this summer’s American Society of Virology meeting in Madison, Wisconsin.