Scientists claim to have made a breakthrough in the fight against Ebola — the often fatal “bleeding disease”.
Ebola viruses are a family of viruses that can often cause very serious haemorrhage fevers. They have caused dozens of frightening and deadly outbreaks across Africa. There is no treatment against Ebola which passes via personal contact.
Now, an international team, led by Thomas Geisbert of Boston University, has used an experimental drug to protect monkeys from death after injecting them with massive doses of the most lethal strain of Ebola virus.
Tests in four rhesus monkeys showed that seven daily injections cured 100 per cent of them, The Lancet medical journal reported.
The experimental drug, developed in collaboration with a Canadian biotech company, contains snippets of RNA derived from three of the Ebola virus’ seven genes. That “payload” is packed in protective packs of nucleic acid and fat molecules, according to the scientists.
“The delivery system is the real key,” the British media quoted Mr Geisbert as saying.
In fact, for the research, the team did two sets of monkey experiments to test the novel drug.
First, the scientists injected four macaques with super-lethal doses of the Zaire strain of Ebola — the deadliest. They gave something like 30,000 times more virus than was needed to kill the animals to set the severest test for the drug.
Then, 30 minutes later, they injected three of the monkeys with the drug. They repeated the dose the next day and again on days three and five after the Ebola infection.
Two out of the three monkeys survived with only mild Ebola symptoms.
The third one died, as did a control animal that didn’t get the drug.
“Then we went back and said, may be this is such a lethal infection, we could improve the outcome by increasing the number of treatments,” Mr Geisbert said.
So, they gave daily injections of the experimental drug over seven days.
This time, all four monkeys given the experimental drug sailed through with mild or absolutely no Ebola symptoms.
The untreated control animal died. The scientists are now planning to carry out another set of experiments on monkeys.