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The ongoing outbreak of Ebola virus disease has been unprecedented in scale and severity, leading to over 5000 deaths to date. With no licensed drugs or vaccines for Ebola, unprecedented measures are being taken to accelerate new drugs and vaccines through clinical development to deployment in early 2015. The Jenner Institute at Oxford University has been undertaking the first clinical trial of the leading candidate vaccine for Ebola. These trials have been initiated with remarkable speed and the subsequent African trials, which are now ongoing, were started as soon as initial safety data were available from the UK. In parallel, extraordinary efforts are being made to manufacture, initially, tens of thousands, and later millions, of doses of a chimpanzee adenovirus vaccine against Ebola.