EBioMedicine: Translating Science to Improve Health

Four years ago, EBioMedicine’s inaugural Editorial highlighted the worst Ebola outbreak in documented history in West Africa, which claimed the lives of 11,300 victims. The virus came back this year to the Democratic Republic of Congo, fortunately at a much smaller scale of outbreak; and this time an experimental vaccine, rVSV-ZEBOV, was administered to more than 3,300 people, covering all known contacts of confirmed Ebola cases as well as those people’s contacts. As of June 28, DR Congo Health Minister said the outbreak, after claiming 29 lives, appears to be under control with no further cases for 21 days now since the last confirmed case. The outbreak can be declared over if no new confirmed case occurs by July 19. TheWorld Health Organization hailed rVSV-ZEBOV as a paradigm shift in the fight against Ebola. We see this as the culmination of many years of research on the basic life cycle of Ebola virus, aswell as on vaccine immunogenicity and effectiveness. Among several other Ebola vaccine and drug approaches, the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine is an example of success that is already reaching end-users in the outbreak setting and getting closer to market authorisation. Translating scientific knowledge to improve human health has been themotto of EBioMedicine since the launch of the journal, andwill remain so as the journal becomes integrated into The Lancet group. The mission that we established for EBioMedicine in our inaugural Editorial still holds true – to serve both the clinical and basic translational research communities by offering a multimedia platform to facilitate dialogue where scientific ideas and clinical needs can be defined, experimentally explored,