The worsening situation in Ebola-struck West Africa calls for the immediate availability of a treatment that can cure patients who contracted the highly fatal disease and a new study highlights the potentials of an experimental drug in treating those infected by the Ebola virus.
A new study has found evidence that the experimental drug called ZMapp, which was given to two Ebola-infected American aid workers who managed to survive the disease, could make a difference in the current outbreak, which the World Health Organization has described to be the worst Ebola outbreak in history, if the drug is produced in greater number.
For the study published in the journal Nature on Friday, Aug. 29, Gary Kobinger, from the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, and colleagues gave the drug to 18 monkeys three to five days after these were infected with the Ebola virus during which most of the animals were already sick.
The researchers found that all of the 18 monkeys were cured while the three sick monkeys in the control group died. The researchers have likewise observed that symptoms of the disease such as excessive bleeding, signs of liver toxicity and rashes also disappeared in the treated monkeys.
"The evidence presented here suggests that ZMapp offers the best option of the experimental therapeutics currently in development for treating EBOV-infected patients," the researchers wrote. "We hope that initial safety testing in humans will be undertaken soon, preferably within the next few months, to enable the compassionate use of ZMapp as soon as possible."
The results of the study raised hopes that ZMapp will also work on people but the researchers themselves cautioned that the effectiveness of the drug on monkey is not a guarantee that ZMapp will also work on humans. Other health experts, however, said that the drug may be the best possible treatment for those who were infected by the Ebola virus.
"To actually be able to reverse all those symptoms and signs and bring them back to baseline, I think that is pretty astounding," said Ebola expert Kartik Chandran, from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. "If you are going to give somebody something during this outbreak, this would be it."
The drug may be the best chance for Ebola patients but the availability of the drug is apparently another problem. San Diego-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, which manufactures ZMapp said that the supply of the drug is exhausted and it takes months to produce more of the drug which is made using genetically-engineered tobacco plants.
