A trial of four experimental Ebola treatments carried out in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has been stopped early after two of them showed strong signs of being able to save patients’ lives. The preliminary results were reported this morning by Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland, one of the partners in the study. The two treatments will now be made widely available and could help end the yearlong outbreak in the DRC, which has already killed more than 1800 people, scientists say.....MORE
The PALM trial (short for the Swahili expression pamoja tulinde maisha, which means “together save lives”) evaluated three Ebola antibody preparations and one antiviral drug in a randomized controlled trial conducted in the midst of the devastating outbreak, which has hit two provinces in the eastern DRC mired in violence. “Today, we have started a new chapter. From now on, we will no longer say that Ebola is not curable,” Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum, head of the DRC’s National Institute for Biomedical Research in Kinshasa, a partner in the trial, said at the press conference.
“This advance will, in the future, help save thousands of lives.” (Muyembe, who was part of the team that discovered Ebola 43 years ago, took over command of the outbreak response in the DRC on 22 July.)
Jeremy Farrar, head of the Wellcome Trust in London, concurs: “This will undoubtedly save lives,” he wrote in a statement. “In the middle of the worst possible conditions, a very solid clinical trial was done that has given us very important information,” Fauci told Science in an interview this morning. “And the beauty of it is that you can now immediately apply it in the field.”
So far, no drugs exist for Ebola; in the current outbreak, two-thirds of all known patients have died. Scientists have tried to treat the disease with existing drugs and develop new treatments tailored to the virus. One of these, the antibody cocktail ZMapp, was hailed as a potential game changer during the West African epidemic, but a trial conducted during in 71 patients, 36 of whom received ZMapp in addition to the standard of care, did not show a significant effect on mortality. Many other therapeutic studies came up empty-handed as well....
Here's the U.S. National Institutes of Health press release also August 12:
Independent monitoring board recommends early termination of Ebola therapeutics trial in DRC because of favorable results with two of four candidates
