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Ebola mutations could make some drugs ineffective

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BALTIMORE SUN     by Scott Dance                                                   Jan. 20, 2015

In the year since Ebola began spreading across West Africa, the virus has mutated in more than 600 ways that change it slightly from versions studied in labs and used to develop treatments, according to researchers at Fort Detrick. And 10 of the mutations could make some drugs used to treat the virus ineffective, they wrote in research published Tuesday.

The "genomic drift," as the scientists called it, could make agents similar to the experimental drug ZMapp unable to bind to the virus anymore.

While the changes affect only a tiny fraction of Ebola's genome, they offer new lessons about the virus that might not have been learned because of the wide scope of the outbreak, larger than all others combined
Read complete story.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/health/bs-hs-ebola-mutation-20150120-story.html

Evaluation of the Potential Impact of Ebola Virus Genomic Drift on the Efficacy of Sequence-Based Candidate Therapeutics

Link to the study.

http://mbio.asm.org/content/6/1/e02227-14

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