Doctors at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda are working on several potential treatments for the deadly Ebola virus and supporting the efforts of other researchers, according to an update posted to the research center's director's blog Tuesday.
The treatments range from vaccines and experimental drugs to the possible use of a drug used to treat HIV, according to the post by Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is located on the Bethesda campus.
Here are the potential treatments currently under development or supported by NIH and NIAID:
ZMapp – Developed by Mapp Biopharmaceutical in San Diego, the drug has been used on several Ebola-infected patients, but its effectiveness hasn’t been determined. NIAID is supporting an effort to advance clinical testing of the drug to determine if it is safe and effective.
Brincidofovir – This experimental drug has shown some ability to suppress the Ebola virus in cell cultures and has been administered to several patients with Ebola, but the small sample size has not given researchers an accurate assessment of the drug’s effectiveness. It’s being developed by Chimerix of Durham, N.C., and it is set to be evaluated on a broader scale in coming months.
Lamivudine – An HIV drug, it is being used on some Ebola patients in Liberia under the supervision of a Liberian physician. In the United States, the drug is being used in cell culture testing and could be expanded to clinical trials if found to be effective.
Ebola vaccine – Several patients are participating this fall in clinical testing of experimental Ebola vaccines, including one developed by NIAID and GlaxoSmithKline. The NIAID-developed vaccine was tested in a small initial study at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda last month and is now expanding to additional test sites. The vaccines are being tested on human patients to determine their safety, but the patients do not have Ebola, according to NIH.
This week, the World Health Organization announced the Ebola virus is killing 70 percent of those infected and warned that there could be as many as 10,000 new cases per week in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea—the West African countries that have been the center of the epidemic.
On Tuesday, the Montgomery County Council received a briefing about the virus from Dr. Ulder J. Tillman, the county’s health officer. Tillman said that the county office is taking the virus seriously, but noted that more people in the United States will die from the flu than Ebola this year and that no cases of the virus have been identified in the state or the region.
