Research

THE CANADIAN PRESS  by Helen Branswell                                                                     Dec. 19, 2014

TORONTO -- Earlier this week, U.S. President Barack Obama signed into law a little piece of legislation that may significantly change the economics of making drugs or vaccines to protect against Ebola and other viruses in its deadly family.

And it might at some point provide a tidy windfall for Merck, the company now developing an Ebola vaccine designed at Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.

A World Health Organization scientist unpacks the Canadian-made Ebola vaccine after receiving them in Geneva on Oct. 22, 2014. Swiss researchers temporarily halted a clinical trial of a Canadian-made Ebola vaccine after seeing an unexpected side-effect in a few people who received the serum. (Mathilde Missioneiro/THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO - WHO)

The bill -- S.2917, also known as "Adding Ebola to the FDA Priority Review Voucher Program Act" -- dangles a sizable carrot meant to entice pharmaceutical companies into developing vaccines and therapies to prevent or cure infection with the virus and other related pathogens in the filovirus family.

U.S. NEWS AND WORLD REPORT HEALTH TODAY   by   Dennis Thompson                            Dec. 17, 2014

A screening test has identified more than 50 drugs that could be helpful in treating people with Ebola, researchers report.

"These drugs are all approved (by the FDA) so they could be deployed quickly if follow-up research proves that they are effective," said study author Adolfo Garcia-Sastre, director of the Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.

The study was published online Dec. 17 in the journal Emerging Microbes and Infections.

The screening test involves a laboratory-engineered fake Ebola virus. The fake virus contains two proteins from the deadly pathogen, but does not include the infectious genetic material that makes Ebola so dangerous, Garcia-Sastre said.

Read complete story.

http://health.usnews.com/health-news/articles/2014/12/17/screening-test-finds-drugs-that-show-promise-against-ebola

Read Emerging Microbes and Infections paper.

http://www.nature.com/emi/journal/v3/n12/full/emi201488a.html

THE GUARDIAN   by Lisa O'Carroll                                Dec. 11, 2014
GENEVA --A clinical trial of an Ebola vaccine has been suspended in all 59 volunteers in Geneva a week early “as a measure of precaution” after four patients complained of joint pains in hands and feet, the University of Geneva hospital said.

“They are all fine and being monitored regularly by the medical team leading the study,” it said on Thursday.

The human safety trials of the vaccine being developed by the pharmaceutical firms Merck and NewLink are scheduled to resume on 5 January in up to 15 volunteers after checks to ensure that the joint pain symptoms were “benign and temporary”, the hospital added.

Read complete story
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/11/ebola-vaccine-trial-suspended-joint-pains

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS                                                                                  Dec, 10, 2014

In an editorial published online today in the International Journal of Epidemiology, experts from the Departments of Psychiatry and Epidemiology at Columbia University, New York, are calling for survivors of the Ebola epidemic to be mobilised in a bid to hasten containment of the disease.

We already know that the current Ebola outbreak is unique in its magnitude and for its dispersion in dense, mobile populations. Physicians and nurses face high mortality, and foreign aid in the form of medical supplies and staff continues to be unequal to the scope of the problem. With a case recovery rate of around 30% at the present time in West Africa, survivors already number in the thousands.