A healthy Briton has become the first person to receive a potential new vaccine for the Ebola virus.

UK volunteer Ruth Atkins was given the candidate inoculation in a safety trial being conducted by experts at the University of Oxford.

She was the first of 60 to receive the experimental drug in the UK trial.

The testing is part of a series of safety trials of potential vaccines to combat the virus, which could offer hope to the thousands facing the illness in West Africa where an outbreak has killed around 53 per cent of those infected.

The vaccine, co-developed by the US National Institutes of Health and British drug company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), targets the “Zaire species” of Ebola which is one of the strains circulating in West Africa.

It uses a single benign Ebola virus protein to generate an immune response. The university said the vaccine does not contain infectious Ebola virus material and will not cause a person taking part in the trial to be infected.

We hope that we can stimulate the production of these antibodies prior to them becoming infected so we can give them that protection

The trials are conducted on healthy people to see whether they suffer any side effects.

The testing will also assess whether those given the jab generate a good immune response.

The vaccine has shown promising results when tested on animals. Pre-clinical research indicated that it provided protection for non-human primates exposed to Ebola without any significant adverse side effects.

A £2.8 million grant was awarded to the Jenner Institute at the university from the Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council and the Department for International Development to accelerate the trials.

The funding will also allow GSK to begin making 10,000 additional doses of the vaccine at the same time as the initial clinical trials.

If it is successful, the drug will be tested in Gambia and Mali to ensure the studies take into account differences between European and West African populations.

In August, when the trial was announced, Professor Adrian Hill, who is leading the research team, said: “The tragic events unfolding in Africa demand an urgent response.

“In recent years, similar investigational vaccines have safely immunised infants and adults against a range of diseases including malaria, HIV and hepatitis C. We, and all our partners on this project, are optimistic that this candidate vaccine may prove useful against Ebola.”

Nearly 5,000 have been infected in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nigeria and Senegal since the outbreak began earlier this year.

One of the experts involved in the trial, Edward Wright from the University of Westminster, said the rate at which Ebola multiplies in the body makes the epidemic difficult to tackle without a vaccine.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that a fast-track process could mean the vaccine being trialled in West Africa by the end of the year.

Dr Wright said: “They are not actually being injected with the Ebola virus, it is one benign protein from this virus that has been incorporated into a harmless virus from a chimpanzee that causes the common cold in chimpanzees.

“The gene that expresses this protein, this Ebola virus protein, is incorporated into this chimpanzee virus and forms the vaccine that is going to be administered to the volunteers in this study.

“Once this virus infects the cells it leads to expression of the Ebola virus protein and this is what will hopefully stimulate the immunity in our volunteers.”

Ebola victims’ antibodies are unable to cope with the fast-replicating virus, but the researchers hope the vaccine will give the immune system the ability to combat the infection.

Dr Wright said: “In the natural course of the disease with the Ebola virus antibodies are stimulated. However the virus replicates so quickly the body is not able to generate enough antibodies to block or inhibit the infection before it can fully take hold.

“So by giving a person this vaccine we hope that we can stimulate the production of these antibodies prior to them becoming infected so we can give them that protection.”