Merck joins hunt for Ebola vaccine

Itching to compete and join the fight to solve one of the world's most talked-about health concerns, Merck & Co. got back in the business of making Ebola vaccine Monday.

The pharmaceutical giant announced that it will pay at least $30 million to license a potential drug from a small, Iowa-based company called NewLink Genetics Corp.

NewLink will get a second payment of $20 million once the next phase of clinical trials starts, which might be in the first months of 2015 - a sign of the accelerated process. NewLink will get royalty payments, but Merck Vaccine's public health chief, Dr. Mark Feinberg, said there will be no payments from sales in low-income countries, such as those hit by the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

Merck is based in Whitehouse Station, N.J., but units in West Point and Upper Gwynedd, Montgomery County, will be part of a global effort to stop an epidemic that has claimed more than 5,000 lives worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.

Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea have been the hardest hit, but other countries have reported Ebola cases. Infected people from those areas, including health workers who treated patients, have traveled to Europe and the United States, and some have died.

In another era, Merck spun off drug candidates while searching for an HIV vaccine. One of those was later developed by Okairos AG - which was bought in 2013 by GlaxoSmithKline. Earlier this year, GSK and a branch of the National Institutes of Health started the first human trials for one type of possible Ebola vaccine. Johnson & Johnson and smaller firms are also accelerating efforts to find a vaccine to stop the deadly virus.

"The world is a different place," said Feinberg, who works from West Point. "Not only is there a need, but there is a pathway to develop such vaccines."

The Public Health Agency of Canada originally developed rVSV-EBOV, the compound it licensed to NewLink, and is already in first-phase human trials. But NewLink needed Merck's size to fully research, develop, manufacture, and distribute any potential medicine. The Canadian agency retains rights in the NewLink-Merck deal, but it also represents the greater focus of governments of developed nations, which fear the spread of the virus.

Multiple U.S. government agencies, along with the WHO, are involved in compressing a decadelong testing-and-development process to a few months.

Drug company science and manufacturing capability is part of that equation. For example, Ebola samples being tested are kept frozen, but a workable vaccine would have to be delivered to hot places where electricity can be nonexistent.

"Any for-profit, publicly-traded company must be responsible to shareholders and needs to be successful overall," Feinberg said. "But for many shareholders and many in our company, there is a responsibility not only for profit, but also a social responsibility to address important public health concerns. At Merck, we have assets and expertise that can be applied to this public health threat."