Ebola: Experimental drug cures laboratory monkeys

The experimental Ebola drug ZMapp cured all 18 of the laboratory monkeys infected with the deadly virus, including those suffering the fever and hemorrhaging characteristic of the disease and just hours from death, scientists said on Friday.

Even monkeys not treated until five days after infection survived. No other experimental Ebola therapy has ever shown success in primates when given that long after infection; the five days is analogous to nine to 11 days after
infection in people.

Although two American aid workers who contracted Ebola in Liberia were cured after receiving ZMapp, their physicians do not know if the drug helped.

A Liberian doctor with the disease died this week despite being given the drug, as did a Spanish priest, Reuters reports.

ZMapp, produced by San Diego-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, has never been scientifically tested in people, and the current study was the first in primates.

The success is therefore a “monumental achievement,” virologist Thomas Geisbert of the University of Texas Medical Branch wrote in a commentary on the paper, published online in Nature.

There are no approved Ebola vaccines or treatments, but human safety trials will begin next week on a vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline Plc and this autumn on one from NewLink Genetics Corp.

The Ebola outbreak in West Africa has killed 1,552 people out of 3,069
confirmed cases, the World Health Organization said, and is on pace to infect 20,000. Neither governments nor private medical groups have been able to contain the outbreak, which WHO said will almost certainly continue into 2015. ZMapp is a mix of three antibodies that bind to proteins on Ebola viruses and trigger the immune system to destroy them. Mapp had previously developed two different cocktails of antibodies, but they protected only 43 percent of monkeys when given as late as five days after infection.

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