Research

NPR                                             Nov. 11, 2014
By Richard Harris

Medical experts are meeting today and tomorrow at the World Health Organization in Geneva to figure out how to test potential Ebola drugs in Africa. In addition to determining which experimental drugs should be the highest priority, the experts are sorting through some difficult ethical issues.

In short, they're trying to figure out how to design tests that will provide the fastest and most trustworthy answers — and yet minimize the need for comparison groups who won't be offered the experimental treatments.

Practice in the United States has set an unrealistic standard. When American health care workers fell ill with Ebola in Africa, they flew home and received medical care vastly better than what Africans were getting, including experimental therapies.

HOMELAND SECURITY NEWS WIRE                                                                             Nov.6, 2014

The University of Toronto, Chematria, and IBM are combining forces in a quest to find new treatments for the Ebola virus.

Using a virtual research technology invented by Chematria, a startup housed at U of T’s Impact Center, the team will use software that learns and thinks like a human chemist to search for new medicines. Running on Canada’s most powerful supercomputer, the effort will simulate and analyze the effectiveness of millions of hypothetical drugs in just a matter of weeks.

“What we are attempting would have been considered science fiction, until now,” says Abraham Heifets, a U of T graduate and the chief executive officer of Chematria. “We are going to explore the possible effectiveness of millions of drugs, something that used to take decades of physical research and tens of millions of dollars, in mere days with our technology.”

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NEW ORLEANS --The quest for an Ebola treatment is picking up speed. Federal officials have unveiled a plan to test multiple drugs at once, in an umbrella study with a single comparison group to give fast answers on what works.

"This is novel for us" and is an approach pioneered by cancer researchers, said Dr. Luciana Borio, head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Ebola response. "We need to learn what helps and what hurts" and speed treatments to patients, she said.

She outlined the plan Wednesday at an American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene conference in New Orleans....

Everyone in the umbrella study would get supportive care, such as intravenous fluids, then be assigned to receive one of several drugs or be in a comparison group. That's needed because without one, there's no way to know if any problems or deaths are from the drug or the disease, Cox said....

                                                                     Nov. 6, 2014

...a WHO-coordinated retrospective study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, provides evidence that supportive care, especially rehydration and correction of metabolic abnormalities, may contribute to patient survival.

The study analysed clinical data on 37 confirmed Ebola patients admitted for treatment at hospitals in Conakry, Guinea’s capital and most densely populated city.

The cases occurred during the first month of West Africa’s first outbreak of Ebola virus disease. Fourteen of the patients were heath care workers. The majority (12) acquired their infection in a health care setting.

The majority (65%) of patients were male, countering assumptions that women, who are more likely to provide home care for patients and prepare bodies for funerals and burials, are more frequently exposed and infected.

To replace fluids lost through severe diarrhoea, 36 patients (97%) received oral rehydration solution. Additional intravenous fluid resuscitation was given to 28 (76%) patients.

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