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New Drug for Deadly Ebola Shows Promise in Monkeys
Monkeys injected with the deadliest strain of Ebola survived after receiving an experimental formula that uses tiny particles of genetic material to disrupt viral reproduction, they said.
It is the first time a drug has protected non-human primates against Ebola, a virus that is sometimes dubbed a "slate wiper" for its ruthless culling of lives.
Ebola is one of a family of so-called filoviruses, which cause haemorrhagic fever, a rare but highly lethal disease in which the patient can bleed to death, sometimes from the mouth, ears and eyes.
Five Ebola strains have been identified since the first case came to light at the Ebola River in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 1976.
The deadliest is the Zaire strain, known to virologists by the acronym of ZEBOV (Zaire Ebola virus), which inflicts a death rate of 80 to 90 percent.
A team led by Thomas Geisbert of the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories Institute at Boston University School of Medicine tested the formula on two groups of rhesus macaque monkeys after getting promising results on guinea pigs.
The drug contains so-called small interfering RNAs, or siRNAs, designed to act as tiny wrenches that are thrown into the machinery of enzymes which enable the virus to replicate.
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