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Ranked as one of the deadliest diseases in the world in terms of mortality rate of infected people, although the total death toll is much lower than COVID-19, there is now an approved treatment for Ebola: laboratory-produced antibodies induced a response immune system and reduced the ability of the virus to infect cells.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced that a cocktail of laboratory-produced antibodies developed by a U.S. pharmaceutical company can be used to treat adult and pediatric Ebola patients. This approval came less than a year after the FDA gave the green light to the first Ebola vaccine.
The virus, which affects both humans and primates, was first detected near the Ebola River in 1976. The first place the virus was located was the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan.
Previously, patients could only be helped by supportive treatments. “This incident means Ebola is now a treatable disease,” says immunologist Erica Saphire of the La Jolla Institute of Immunology in California.
The drug cocktail in question was evaluated alongside three other experimental treatments for Ebola in a clinical trial conducted in Congo in 2018 and 2019, during the second largest epidemic of the disease. Of the people treated with this drug during the study, 33.8% died after 28 days, compared with 51% for other types of treatment.
The drug consists of three different man-made monoclonal antibodies designed to mimic those produced naturally during an immune response. One examines the structures that allow the Ebola virus to infiltrate human cells, while the other two involve immune cells to eliminate the virus and infected cells.
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