Ebola pushes Emory into vanguard of fight against infectious diseases

AFTER successfully treating four Ebola patients last year, Emory University in Atlanta is now leading a US governmentfunded project that will use blood from survivors of the deadly virus to test a novel way of treating infectious disease.

Traditional vaccines boost the immune system’s response to infections.

The new project will inject people with genetic material, such as DNA or RNA, in hopes of spurring a person’s own cells to make specific antibodies capable of fighting Ebola or other pathogens.

“The person’s body is the factory,” says Dr James Crowe of Vanderbilt University, one of the collaborators on the project. “It’s a cool idea.”

Experts say the method, if proven to be safe and effective, would be faster and cheaper than conventional drug production, and could be used to treat illnesses such as seasonal flu or malaria.

Antibodies are grown in large vats of mammal cells or in some cases, tobacco plants, such as Mapp Biopharmaceutical’s experimental Ebola treatment, called ZMapp.

The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s elite research arm, has awarded Emory up to $10.8m over three years to direct the project.

It will include research teams at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and several academic research labs.

Getting access to blood samples from survivors of the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa has been challenging, but Emory has a distinct advantage in having treated a small number of patients on US soil.

All four of its former patients have agreed to take part in the programme, says project leader Rafi Ahmed, director of the Emory Vaccine Center. Dr Ahmed and colleagues intend to isolate antibodies made by these patients in response to the Ebola virus, and through a series of experiments in animals, identify the most effective ones for fighting off an infection.

approach is unrelated to an experimental treatment provided to several Ebola patients in the US, which involved transfusions of blood plasma from Ebola survivors.

Researchers will take two approaches. In one, they will produce large quantities of Ebola-fighting antibodies that could be infused into patients intravenously, a conventional approach known as passive immunisation.

Protection using this method has a short half life of about two to three weeks, and the antibodies require refrigeration, which is not always available in countries fighting an infectious disease outbreak.

That is why the team is also testing the new method for making protective drugs based