Ebola drug works in monkeys with West Africa strain

A study in monkeys offers the first evidence that a leading drug developed to fight Ebola works against the strain causing the current outbreak in West Africa.

Six animals were infected with a very high dose of the virus and then, three days later, half were given the drug, TKM-Ebola-Makona, which was designed specifically to fight the West African strain. The monkeys that got the drug survived, but all three untreated monkeys died, researchers reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.

TKM-Ebola-Makona is already being tested in Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, but results are not yet available. An earlier version of the drug, created to treat a slightly different strain, was given to several Ebola patients in the United States, but it was impossible to tell whether it helped them because they also received other treatments at the same time.

The drugs are given intravenously and can cause flulike symptoms, including headaches, chills and fever. They belong to a category called short interfering RNAs, or siRNAs, which work by blocking certain genes in the virus, impairing its ability to replicate. The design of these drugs varies depending on the genetic sequence of the virus. But viruses can mutate, and new strains can evolve. Researchers have wondered whether a drug made to treat one strain would also work against other strains of the same virus.

The original TKM-Ebola was created to fight the Kikwit strain, from an earlier outbreak. The new strain, Makona, is closely related but not identical.

Meanwhile, a court in Guinea has sentenced 11 people to life in prison for murdering a team educating locals about the risks of Ebola in a remote part of the West African country last year, a state prosecutor said Wednesday.

The bodies of eight people were discovered in September in Womey, a village near the city of Nzerekore around 620 miles southeast of the capital Conakry.

Some had been hacked to death with machetes or had their throats slit before their bodies were thrown into latrines, witnesses at the trial in Nzerekore said.