Ebola drug cures monkeys

31 สิงหาคม 2557

ZMapp, which may or may not cure Ebola in humans, is very effective with monkeys, scientists report. Results in humans have been inconclusive, but the monkey findings give new hope the drug will one day be a cure for the deadly disease.

ZMapp, which may or may not cure Ebola in humans, is very effective with monkeys, scientists report. Results in humans have been inconclusive, but the monkey findings give new hope the drug will one day be a cure for the deadly disease.

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Health care workers, wearing protective suits, leave a high-risk area at the French NGO Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without borders) Elwa hospital on August 30, 2014 in Monrovia. For them, an effective drug against Ebola can't come quickly enough. AFP PHOTO / DOMINIQUE FAGET

Ebola drug cures monkeys

PARIS, AFP – A prototype drug that has been urgently given to a handful of patients with Ebola has cleared an important test hurdle, showing that it cured lab monkeys with the disease, scientists said Friday.

Normally, experimental drugs are tested first on animals and then on progressively larger groups of humans to ensure they are safe and effective.

But, in an exceptional move, a new drug called ZMapp that has not gone through these tests has been rushed to the outbreak in west Africa, as the lethal disease has no cure.

Reporting online in the British journal Nature, researchers at the Public Health Agency of Canada said 18 rhesus macaque monkeys given high doses of Ebola virus fully recovered after being given ZMapp, even when it was administered five days after infection.

It reversed dangerous symptoms such as bleeding, rashes and high levels of enzymes in the liver.

Three "control" monkeys that had been infected, but not treated, all died within eight days.

Independent experts hailed the results as an encouraging first step in the long vetting process.

They added, though, it was still unclear whether ZMapp worked on humans, as two patients who have been given it have died and two others have recovered.

"Widespread availability and use of ZMapp will require human safety testing and licensing, coupled with scaleup of the manufacturing process," cautioned David Evans, a professor of virology at Britain's University of Warwick.

A cocktail of three antibodies designed to cling to the Ebola virus and inhibit its reproduction, ZMapp is being developed by Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc. of San Diego, California, partly in conjunction with the US Army.

ZMapp has so far been given to seven infected frontline workers.

Of these, two American doctors have recovered; a Liberian doctor and a Spanish priest have died; and a doctor and a nurse, both Liberian, and a British nurse, who has been flown to London from Sierra Leone, are still in treatment.

Stocks of ZMapp, which is derived from tobacco leaves and is hard to produce on a large scale, are exhausted, the company said on August 12.