The Ebola Virus Is Now 90% Curable, Saving Lives Of Thousands Of People In Africa

As it has been for years, the Democratic Republic of Congo is still embroiled in strife.

But in the midst of that violence, doctors have been running medical trials to deal with another killer in the region, Ebola. And now, they believe they might finally have a cure.

Images courtesy: Reuters

The drug trials are being cosponsored by the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health, who announced this week that two of the experimental treatments they were testing seem to dramatically boost survival rates.

To be clear, there have been plenty of trials before. In the past year that the ebola outbreak has run riot through the Congo, there has been at least one experimental vaccine that has proven capable of shielding people from catching the virus. However, this is the first ever possibility of a cure.

"From now on, we will no longer say that Ebola is incurable," said Jean-Jacques Muyembe, director general of the Institut National de Recherche Biomedicale in the DRC.

Starting in November, patients at four treatment centers in the eastern region of the country (where the outbreak has been the worst) were assigned to randomly receive one of four experimental treatments. There was an antiviral drug called remdesivir, and three other drugs that use monoclonal antibodies.

These antibodies are basically custom-crafted proteins designed to recognise invading viruses and recruit immune cells to specifically combat them. ZMapp, one of these drugs, is currently standard treatment during Ebola outbreaks. It had been previously tested and used during the West Africa ebola epidemic of 2014, so it was the baseline success for the new trials.

Now patients treated with ZMapp show a mortality rate of about 49 percent according to Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. That's obviously much lower than the 75 percent mortality rate of ebola sufferers that don't seek treatment.

But one of the antibody cocktails tested, developed by a company called NIAID, performed even better, lowering the mortality rate to 34 percent. Another drug developed by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals did even better than that, lowering the mortality rate to just 29 percent. And that's in serious patients.

Apparently the drugs were even more effective when administered to patients who had just gotten sick, when their viral load was still low. There, NIAID's drug lowered mortality rates to 11 percent while Regeneron's drug saw only 6 percent of patients die.

That's a huge jump from previous medication, and the monoclonal antibodies could be crucial to stemming the outbreak and ridding the world of ebola for good. The reason it's taken so long though is because it's really hard to develop these drugs.

Scientists have to infect a creature (usually mice) with the virus and then collect the antibodies their immune systems produce to fight it. Those have to then be tweaked to more closely resemble human antibodies in order to not be rejected by the body. Additionally, the Ebola virus has an ability to change shape, making it harder for antibodies designed to engulf and block them to do their job. That's why this cocktail approach was used, which mixes three different antibodies in order to have the best chance.

"Today's news puts us one more step to saving more lives," said WHO's director of health emergencies, Mike Ryan. "The success is clear. But there's also a tragedy linked to the success. The tragedy is that not enough people are being treated. We are still seeing too many people staying away from treatment centers, people not being found in time to benefit from these therapies."

Since the outbreak began last August in the Northern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, more than 2,800 people have been infected, with 1,794 confirmed to have died from the disease. The real number could be even higher. And because of a lack of awareness, people are avoiding treatment and therefore raising the chances of it being transmitted across the border to other African nations.

So if this drug is going to work to stop the epidemic, WHO needs to get it approved, manufactured in bulk, and put into circulation immediately.