The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved clinical trials of Aethlon Medical's Hemopurifier device for Ebola patients.
The latest Ebola outbreak that started in Early 2014 in West Africa has affected thousands of people. Many people are dying of the disease as no approved vaccine is available to cure the disease. On Jan. 2, the San Diego-based Aethlon Medical announced that FDA has approved clinical protocol to treat Ebola infected people in the U.S. with the Hemopurifier.
Hemopurifier is a bio-filtration device that filters toxins and virus from an infected person's body. Ebola patients will be treated with the help of the device for between six and eight hours till the Ebola virus count drops to less than 1,000 copies per milliliter. The federal agency has allowed the use of the device on up to 20 Ebola patients in the nation.
Aethlon's Hemopurifier was tested on an Ebola patient in Germany, who fully recovered after getting a treatment from the device. The German patient had 400,000 virus copies per milliliter of blood before the treatment began and following the treatment the counts were reduced to 1,000 copies only. The therapy stops once the virus copies count gets below 1,000 per milliliter.
"The treatment was well tolerated with no adverse events reported. At the time of treatment, the Ebola patient was unconscious and suffering from multiple organ failure, which required mechanical ventilation, continuous dialysis and the administration of vasopressor medications. The patient has since made a full recovery and returned home to his family," per Aethlon.
The latest Ebola outbreak has claimed the lives of over 7,900 people mainly in the West African countries of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. Only a handful of cases were reported in the U.S. and most of the infected patients recovered.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is working along with some well-known pharmaceutical companies such as U.K. based GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to develop a medicine to cure Ebola. A previous report suggested that an Ebola vaccine is already under clinical trials and will be commercially available in 2015.
The Aethlon Hemopurifier gives a glimmer of hope to critically-ill Ebola patients. However, it is not known by when the device will be commercially available to save the lives of hundreds of people who are dying in remote parts of West Africa.
