Ebola vaccine successfully tested in monkeys

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Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...033101355.html
Researchers Successfully Test Ebola Vaccines

Monday, March 31, 2008; 12:00 AM

MONDAY, March 31 (HealthDay News) -- Researchers have successfully tested several Ebola vaccines in monkeys and are now working to create the first human vaccine for one of the world's deadliest diseases.

"The biothreat posed by Ebola virus cannot be overlooked. We are seeing more and more naturally occurring human outbreaks of this deadly disease. With worldwide air travel and tourism, the virus can now be transported to and from remote regions of the world. And it has huge potential as a possible weapon of bioterrorism. We desperately need a protective vaccine," Dr. Anthony Sanchez, of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a prepared statement.

He noted that it has been difficult to create a vaccine for Ebola, "because simple 'killed' viruses that just trigger an antibody response from the blood are not effective. For these viruses, we need to get a cell-mediated response, which involves our bodies producing killer T-cells before immunity is strong enough to prevent or clear an infection."

The team of American and Canadian scientists used several different recombinant DNA techniques to trigger a cell-mediated response and produce Ebola vaccines that are effective in monkeys. One of these vaccines will soon be tested on humans for the first time.

"Ebola virus infection of humans can be highly lethal, but monkeys rarely survive the infection and have been very useful as animal models. Ebola vaccine trials using primates have provided unambiguous results and have allowed the development of protective vaccines to progress rapidly," Sanchez said. "Successful human trials will mean that we can vaccinate health care workers and other key personnel during outbreaks of Ebola hemorrhagic fever, helping us to protect their lives and control the spread of the disease."

The research was to be presented Monday at a meeting of the Society for General Microbiology in Edinburgh, Scotland.

More information

For more on Ebola, visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

SOURCE: Society for General Microbiology, news release, March 30, 2008

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Re: Ebola vaccine successfully tested in monkeys

Source: http://www.argosy.ca/view.php?aid=40617

Ebola cured! Well, except in humans and animals
By Sasha Van Katwyk

Over the last decade there have been medical breakthroughs in curing Ebola, a horrendous disease that has one of the highest death rates of all diseases. Most of the research on the matter has been able to freeze the spread and reproduction of the Ebola virus, but has failed to be transferred into humans and animals infected with the disease. What has been achieved, however, is the capacity for scientists to effectively kill Ebola in its environment which can, over time, become a prevention tactic for new outbreaks.

Ebola is a virus transferred through basic human-to-human or human-to-animal contact. There are four threads of the virus, each of them appropriately named for the countries where the breakouts first occurred. A human infected with Ebola suffers from a range of symptoms including heavy fever, vomiting, pain, malaise, muscle spasms, and massive internal and/or external bleeding. The chances of survival are less than one-in-five, making Ebola one of the highest case-rate killers in the world.

In Western Africa, where most cases of Ebola are reported, this virus can sit for days within the host allowing for its spread within a community to become very wide before suddenly coming on. The progress of the disease once in motion, however, is extremely fast and therefore nearly impossible to treat. Because of the intensity of the virus, the science to cure it has also had to be intense. Many of the breakthroughs in treatment have been extremely effective in trapping and eliminating the virus with speed and aggression giving scientists confidence that this could be a virus that can be permanently cured with a lesser chance of giving the virus time to mutate.

Dr. Maurice Iwu, head of the Bioresources Development and Conservation Programme in Africa, and his team have used a compound from the common Western African plant Garcinia kola called dimeric flavonoid. Using this compound Dr. Iwu and his research team have found a way to halt the continued growth as well as weaken the survival strengths of the virus once isolated. Scientists at the Dale and Betty Bumpers Vaccine Research Center (VRC), part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Bethesda, Md. have been able to create a fast-acting vaccine to protect moneys from picking up the virus with a single injection that is completely effective within one month.

Breakthroughs such as this are promising starts to avoid outbreaks through both human treatment and animal vaccination. As Ebola finds its home in the jungles of tropical regions, the curing or vaccination of animals from this virus is a vital step in preventing the deaths of humans. These developments along with the education programmes in place in Western Africa that teach people to stay away from monkeys who look in heat, depressed, and are bleeding out of their orifices (seriously) have all lead to a decrease in outbreaks.

Another major breakthrough was made by Doctors Gail Derin and Vickie Menear who related the symptoms of certain threads of influenza to the symptoms of the most deadly of the Ebola threads and matched the treatments resulting in 95 per cent of the symptoms becoming non-existent in human hosts. This discovery was mildly undercut by the fact that, for 50 per cent of those who were given the treatment, one of those 5 per cent of symptoms was still death. Nonetheless, there is a small something that must be said for reducing a death rate to a 1-in-2 chance of survival which, for most of us, is more than enough to convince us to choose that treatment.

Despite the seemingly hollow hopes of some come-close cures for humans, the capacity of science to destroy the virus outside a host can, if rigorously utilised in regions that are known to have Ebola, prevent any further casualties from this horrible disease. While it?s rare for a newspaper to be able to print a headline that reads ?Deadly Disease Cured,? in this case we can, for the most part.