The World Health Organization said Friday that the vaccine has been 100 percent effective at tests performed in Guinea.

The blueprint is expected to be presented to the WHO’s annual conference of health ministers, the World Health Assembly, in 2016, Kieny said.

More than 11,000 people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia have died since the epidemic began in Guinea in December 2013.

A second study group of 3,528 people were injected with the vaccine three weeks after they’d potentially been exposed to Ebola.

In the study, people were protected against the Ebola virus within six to 10 days of vaccination. It’s “promising” but results still need to be confirmed by the scientific community, she said.

Another major trial in Liberia, which had aimed to sign up more than 28,000 subjects, had to stop enrolling after only reaching its mid-stage target of 1,500 participants, and plans for testing in Sierra Leone were also scaled back.

Added Peter Smith of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the results were “very exciting and suggest that the Ebola vaccine tested may be highly effective in protecting against Ebola disease among those in the immediate vicinity of an Ebola case”.

The first person to receive the trial vaccine in Guinea was Mohamed Soumah, 27.

Produced by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), under a very-high magnification, this digitally-colorized scanning electron micrograph (SEM) depicts a single filamentous Ebola virus particle that had budded from the surface of a VERO cell of the African green monkey kidney epithelial cell line.

“We believe that it is important that the worldwide community continues to support the development of more than one vaccine for the control of Ebola including those that might be more suitable for vaccination of pregnant women, infant children and the immunocompromised”, it said in a statement.

The vaccine, rVSV-ZEBOV, is in the midst of a big Phase III trial in West Africa, home to the most recent-and deadliest-outbreak of Ebola.

Of the 2,014 people who received the vaccine immediately as part of the first arm, none developed Ebola ten days after getting the vaccine.

The world is on the verge of an effective Ebola vaccine, according to findings published Friday in the medical journal the Lancet. After one patient contracts the disease, their close contacts are vaccinated in the hope of stemming the onward spread of the virus.

Disclosure: The vaccine candidate is licensed to NewLink Genetics Corp. and Merck.

Health experts claim the vaccine could help shut down the rest of the waning epidemic in West Africa if approved by regulators.