Research

WASHINGTON POST by  Rachel Feltman                      Dec. 29, 2014

Pharmaceutical company Roche announced Monday that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had provided an Emergency Use Authorization -- a sort of pre-approval for use in particularly bad outbreaks -- for a new kind of Ebola test.

This isn't the first test to get this kind of approval during the 2014 outbreak of the Zaire strain of Ebola, which has killed more than 7,500 people to date and is still an ongoing crisis in parts of West Africa.... 

So it's no surprise that Swiss company Roche has put its version of a rapid test forward. The LightMix Ebola Zaire rRT-PCR Test works in about three hours, and is designed for Roche's testing consoles.

REUTERS                                                              Dec. 24, 2014

ACCRA—Medical detective work will be the next big phase in the fight against Ebola when the United Nations deploys hundreds of health workers to identify chains of infection as the virus passes from person to person, top U.N. health workers said.
Health workers bury the body of a suspected Ebola victim at a cemetery in Freetown, Dec. 21, 2014.

The health teams will travel to each district and region of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, the three countries at the center of the epidemic, to trace who each infected person has potentially contacted.

The effort will run in parallel with measures to minimize the spread of infection, such as treating all Ebola patients in specialized centers and burying all victims safely.

But Phase Two of the plan is to contain the virus by understanding its lines of transmission, said World Health Organization Director-General Margaret Chan.

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WIRED     by   Erika Check Hayden                                                                              Dec. 23, 2014

KENEMA, Sierra Leone—Mohammed Sankoh Yillah, an outreach worker, spent days in the Ebola ward caring for his sister, nurse Mbalu Fonnie. After Fonnie died in July, Yillah tested positive for the virus. He was transported to another hospital for treatment, but asked to come back to Kenema to die.

But Yillah survived.

Today Yillah sits with four colleagues in an office, discussing a new research project. The study is collecting information about survivors like him. The hope is that the study might help explain why he and others beat Ebola, while their friends and colleagues—Alex, Mbalu—did not.

Epidemiologist Lina Moses runs the meeting. Her colleagues back at Tulane University, she says, hope to analyze blood samples from survivors; she collected 29 such samples here in November. “What they want to know in the laboratory,” she says, “is what kind of antibodies Mohammed Yillah has that helped him to survive Ebola.”

GENOMEWEB                                                                                                                        Dec. 22, 2014
NEW YORK -- Tekmira Pharmaceuticals announced today that it has signed a deal that will support the clinical testing of its experimental Ebola therapy designed against the strain of the virus behind the outbreak in West Africa.

Tekmira has long been developing an siRNA-based Ebola drug called TKM-Ebola, but a Phase I study of that agent was suspended by US regulators until the company could provide additional safety data. Earlier this year, Tekmira management indicated that that trial might not restart as early as anticipated since the firm had begun focusing on a version specifically for the Guinea strain of the Ebola virus, which is driving the ongoing outbreak.

Tekmira said it has now inked a manufacturing and clinical trial agreement with the University of Oxford to provide the new drug, called TKM-Ebola-Guinea, for clinical trials in West Africa. The university is the representative of the International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium, which will be testing TKM-Ebola-Guinea in infected individuals with funding from the Wellcome Trust.