New Ebola Virus Treatment May be Effective Against the Strain that Killed Thousands

A new Ebola treatment may be effective against a specific strain of the virus that killed thousands of people in West Africa. The new post-exposure treatment could be huge in terms of saving lives in the future.

The treatment itself uses a sequence specific short strand of RNA, known as siRNA, designed to target and interfere with the Ebola virus, rendering it harmless. One of the benefits of this particular approach is the ability to quickly modify it to different viral strains. This means that it could be used to tackle the different types of Ebola.

"We quickly adapted our candidate treatment to target the Makona outbreak strain of Ebola virus," said Thomas Geisbert, one of the researchers, in a news release. "We were able to protect all of our nonhuman primates against a lethal Makona Ebola infection when treatment began three days following infection. At this point, those infected showed clinical signs of disease and had detectable levels of virus in their blood."

Although all of the infected animals showed evidence of advanced disease, those that received treatment had milder symptoms and recovered fully. The untreated controls, in contrast, succumbed to the disease on days eight and nine, which is similar to that reported in the field after patients begin showing symptoms of Ebola.

The treatment also protected against liver and kidney dysfunction and blood disorders that occur during an Ebola infection. This shows that this treatment could be crucial when it comes to improving survival rates and effective control of virus levels in the body.

The current treatment is now being evaluated in Ebola-infected patients in Sierra Leone. If successful, it's likely that this treatment will be used more widely in the future.

The findings are published in the journal Nature.

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