Doctors Without Borders will begin Ebola drug studies by December in Africa
Doctors Without Borders will begin clinical trials of three experimental Ebola therapies in West Africa in December, the aid group announced Wednesday.
The studies, to be conducted at the group's treatment centers in Guinea and Liberia, will test therapies already used in some Ebola patients in the USA and Europe: the antiviral drugs brincidofovir and favipiravir, as well as blood donations from Ebola survivors.
Brincidofovir, made by Chimerix of North Carolina, was given to cameraman Ashoka Mukpo, Liberian national Thomas Eric Duncan physician Craig Spencer. Mukpo and Spencer survived but Duncan received the drug just a couple days before he died.
Favipiravir, an anti-flu drug made by Japan's Fujifilm Holding Corp. was given to a French nurse who worked with Doctors Without Borders.
And blood donations from Ebola survivors - which contain antibodies against the virus -- have been used since the first Ebola outbreak in 1976.
More recently, American Ebola patient Kent Brantly, a physician, received a blood donation from a teenager survivor before he left Liberia for treatment at Atlanta's Emory University Hospital. He later donated blood to several other Ebola patients: Mukpo, physician Richard Sacra and nurses Nina Pham and Amber Vinson. Missionary Nancy Writebol, also treated at Emory, donated blood to Vinson and Spencer, although only Spencer needed it.
Brantly and Writebol also both received the experimental drug ZMapp. Supplies of that drug, which takes months to manufacture, are now exhausted.
None of these treatments has been proven to work. Although all eight American patients survived, scientists can't say for certain what allowed them to beat the odds, because each received multiple types of therapy, said Amesh Adalja, senior associate at the Center for Health Security at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. And the number of patients treated, even including the additional handful in Europe, was just too small to allow researchers to draw any conclusions.
More than 13,000 peoiple have been infected with Ebola in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia and nearly 5,000 have died, according to the World Health Organization.
The trials will be an international effort, involving WHO, the University of Oxford, the Wellcome Trust, the International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium, French National Institute of Health and Medical Research and the Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine in the Netherlands.
'This is an unprecedented international partnership that represents hope for patients to finally get a real treatment against a disease that today kills between 50% and 80% of those infected,' said Annick Antierens of Doctors Without Borders, in a statement. The group hopes to give patient 'a better chance of survival.'
Initial results could be available in February 2015.
This undated handout photo issued by Save the Children UK on Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2014, shows prospective health care workers in the Kerry Town Ebola Treatment Centre being tested on their personal protection equipment procedure in Sierra Leone.(Photo: Louis Leeson, AP)
'Conducting clinical trials of investigational drugs in the midst of a humanitarian crisis is a new experience for all of us, but we are determined not to fail the people of West Africa,' said Peter Horby, chief investigator of the brincidofovir trial, in a statement.
Doctors Without Border has urged the drugs' developers to scale up production now, to be ready to provide the therapies to large numbers of patients at an affordable price.
Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine in Houston, called the trials 'very important and highly welcomed.'
American troops may play a vital role in getting new therapies and vaccines to patients, because they're constructing treatment centers where the therapies can be administered, Hotez said.
'Real-time research during public health emergencies is crucially important, whether for Ebola or pandemic influenza,' Adalja said.
The WHO has said that it expect vaccine studies to begin in Africa by January.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1qEeEYT
