In West Africa, Lassa fever remains a power and recurring successfully being threat, causing hundreds of lives every year and underscoring urgent need for sustained investment in study and vaccine manufacturing capability. In the first 5 months of 2025 alone, Nigeria reported over 717 confirmed cases and 138 deaths, highlighting the escalating possibility and the serious importance of vaccine preparedness.
Developing any vaccine begins with addressing a successfully-define public successfully being need. For Lassa fever, which blueprint identifying the gap, understanding the place and how the virus spreads, and who is most in possibility. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI)-funded Enable look performs a key position in these efforts, generating remarkable epidemiological and seroprevalence information during affected communities. These insights are needed for strengthening outbreak preparedness and straight inform future clinical trial make and discipline determination, ensuring that vaccine construction efforts are focused and impactful.
Records alone is no longer sufficient. The Enable look would maybe be building serious discipline capability, from strengthening chilly-chain methods to laboratory diagnostics to improved ethical evaluate processes and information administration. These investments are ensuring that West Africa is no longer ultimate prepared to host Lassa vaccine trials but positioned to lead them.
Vaccine study breakthroughs — Nigerian and world momentum
A fresh wave of scientific growth is redefining the possibilities for Lassa fever prevention. In June 2025, Nigerian virologist, Dr Simeon Agwale of Innovative Biotech announced a necessary step forward, a Lassa fever vaccine developed from a strain native to Nigeria. Licensed from Medigen USA, the vaccine finished 100% security in preclinical trials involving mice and non-human primates exposed to the Nigerian Lassa virus strain. This represented a serious advancement from earlier candidates in line with the Sierra Leonean Josiah strain. With this growth, Nigeria is prepared to begin Portion 1 clinical trials, field to manufacturing scale-up and facility upgrades to meet Correct Manufacturing Observe (GMP) standards.
Complementing these national efforts, CEPI is supporting in several world vaccine candidates, including the IAVI-developed rVSV-essentially essentially based fully Lassa vaccine, modelled on the a success Ebola vaccine platform. Now in Portion 2a trials, the look is enrolling extra than 600 contributors, adults, kids, and kids, during Nigeria, Ghana, and Liberia by the PREVAIL partnership (Partnership for Examine on Vaccines and Infectious Ailments in Liberia).
These trials are assessing the vaccine’s security and ability to generate an immune response, with outcomes anticipated in 2025. Conducting the studies in West African internet sites ensures the vaccine is evaluated in the very communities most affected, whereas simultaneously strengthening trial infrastructure and regional capability. Growth would maybe be being made with the ChAdOx1 Lassa vaccine, developed by Oxford University’s Pandemic Science Institute and supported by CEPI. Using a modified adenovirus vector, the linked platform because the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, the candidate entered Portion 1 clinical trials in London in early 2025.
Strengthening study and training infrastructure during West Africa
Across West Africa, momentum is building to present a boost to vaccine study and trial capability, pushed by regional collaboration and national management. The Lassa Vaccine Coalition, led by the West Africa Effectively being Organisation (WAHO), brings collectively governments, researchers, and regulators to be certain vaccine construction is aligned with native priorities. International locations including Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Liberia gain established national Lassa vaccine job forces to coordinate preparedness and plod readiness for clinical trial.
A growing skill pipeline is advancing these goals. The Vanderbilt-Nigeria Building Examine Means in HIV/Non-communicable Ailments (V-BRCH) programme is training researchers in ethics and Correct Clinical Observe (GCP), whereas the Institute of Genomics and International Effectively being (formerly ACEGID) delivers genomic and diagnostic training serious for Lassa study. The Nigeria Arena Epidemiology Training Programme (NFETP) has produced extra than 300 epidemiologists with experience in surveillance and outbreak response. The Kano Independent Examine Centre Have confidence (KIRCT) serves as a mannequin clinical trial centre, geared up with improved laboratories, biorepositories, and remarkable community engagement methods.
To growth, West Africa requires focused investments in vaccinology training, trial infrastructure, and profession pathways that can translate scientific skill into sustained regional management in vaccine construction.
Closing the gap between study and manufacturing
Examine alone can no longer elevate accessible suggestions without manufacturing capability. While Senegal’s Institut Pasteur de Dakar leads regional human vaccine manufacturing, most West African international locations, including Nigeria, rely intently on imports for routine immunisation. Nigeria’s National Veterinary Examine Institute (NVRI) at indicate produces about 120 million livestock vaccine doses every year, with plans to scale as much as 850 million doses by upgrading amenities to meet GMP standards. Nonetheless, human vaccine manufacturing remains restricted. Power challenges, including inadequate infrastructure, scarce native uncooked offers, and high manufacturing charges gain kept Nigerian amenities off the list of producers progressing toward WHO prequalification for human vaccines.
Bridging these gaps demands a multi-pronged blueprint: sustained investment in training, expansion of clinical trial networks, and a regulatory framework that enable innovation. With scientific breakthroughs on the horizon, Nigeria and its neighbours gain a possibility to transition from being passive vaccine recipients to filled with life producers, building a self-reliant pathway to controlling Lassa fever and other endemic threats.
Existing Country Efforts in Strengthening Examine and Clinical Trial Means in Nigeria
In September 2023, the Coordinating Minister of Effectively being and Social Welfare, Prof. Muhammad Ali Pate, launched the Lassa Vaccine Activity Power, bringing collectively two lead govt businesses, the Nigeria Centre for Diseaase Regulate (NCDC) and the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Regulate (NAFDAC), below a single national strategy. The Activity Power coordinates a unified national response, ensuring Nigeria’s priorities are embedded in world eaefforts to originate and advance Lassa fever vaccine candidates.
Alongside this, the Presidential Initiative for Unlocking the Healthcare Ticket Chain (PVAC) is focusing on three priorities, investment mobilisation, native manufacturing and provide-chain resilience, to minimize import dependency and shorten lead instances for needed scientific merchandise. Nonetheless, despite infrastructure expansion, a serious shortage of skilled researchers risks slowing growth.
Light fellowships that ship researchers foreign gain constructed individual experience but gain seldom translated into sustainable, home-grown R&D ecosystems. Outdated postgraduate curricula provide restricted training in vaccinology and trial methodology, whereas returning fellows frequently confront below-resourced centres of excellence with restricted grant make stronger. Few structured mentorship programmes or profession-pathway structures exist to retain high skill.
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Building resilient clinical-trial capability remains an needed, but frequently underestimated precedence. CEPI has invested enormously into pan-African trial networks, recognising that achieving world goals, just like the “100 Days Mission” requires no longer ultimate remarkable vaccine candidate pipelines but in addition fully operational, high quality look platforms in affected communities. For Nigeria, strengthening these networks blueprint enabling scientists to make, oversee, and elevate trials spoil-to-spoil within the nation, accelerating every national and world epidemic response.
Strategic actions
Lessons from regional and national initiatives illustrate what’s attainable when infrastructure and skill align. Ready-to-deploy trial platforms can enormously minimize construction timelines, whereas partnerships that connect native scientists with international consultants wait on get a group in a position to independent innovation. To staunch Nigeria’s discipline as a leader in Lassa fever vaccine construction, valorous and coordinated action is foremost.
A. Overhaul postgraduate programmes, shifting from colossal theoretical training to specialised, industry-aligned tracks in vaccinology, drug construction, and clinical study that intention on up-to-date curricula and specialised opportunities such because the Developed Course in Vaccinology (ADVAC), ensuring information is utilized and sustained domestically.
B. Set up and adequately fund fresh study centres anchored in national priorities, linked to every native industry and world networks.
C. Sustain investment in clinical trial infrastructure so studies can launch rapidlly and meet the last phrase standards.
Collaboration must change into the norm: universities, biotech startups, govt businesses, and international organisations working collectively to get a seamless pipeline from understanding to impress.
