A Canadian pharmaceutical company is partnering with Harvard University and Brigham and Women's Hospital to develop an oral drug that blocks the Ebola virus and could be tested on humans as early as this year, according to researchers and the company's president.
"Even if this current epidemic passes, Ebola has been back and forth over the past 40 or so years now," said John Huss, president and CEO of H&P Labs Inc. "It's not something that's always there, but it comes and goes. We weren't ready for this outbreak, but we could be ready for the next outbreak."
H&P Labs announced a licensing agreement with Harvard and Brigham and Women's for two compounds that prevent both the contraction of the Ebola virus and its spread within the body, according to Dr. James Cunningham, a physician at Brigham and Women's and lead researcher on the project.
"The current evidence suggests that the Ebola infection pathway is a complex, multistep process, and our lab has developed compounds that interfere with a couple of those steps," Cunningham said.
One of the compounds, he said, prevents the initial entry of the virus into cells, while the other prevents the transport of the virus.
The research was conducted by Cunningham and collaborators at the Cunningham lab at Brigham and Women's and at Harvard Medical School's New England Regional Center of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases, and Centers of Excellence for Translational Research. According to Cunningham, the research has been progressing for about 10 years.
Huss said H&P Labs will use the findings to develop an oral treatment against the virus and will begin testing on animals during the second quarter of this year.
"If everything pans out as we expect it to, then we bring it into humans late 2015, early 2016," he said.
The announcement of the licensing agreement comes as researchers and pharmaceutical companies work overtime to find a marketable way to battle the deadly Ebola outbreak, which has claimed more than 8,000 lives, mostly in West Africa.
Also yesterday, the World Health Organization announced that the final-stage trials of several experimental vaccines will begin this month or next. About 90 experts met at WHO headquarters to discuss plans for clinical trials in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
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