Ebola prevention posters outside a school at Toulepleu, at the border of Liberia, in western Ivory Coast. Photograph: Thierry Gouegnon/Reuters
Three trials of experimental Ebola drugs will start next month at treatment centres run by the volunteer doctors of Médecins Sans Frontières in west Africa, it has been announced.
The trials are unprecedented because they are being run during an epidemic and the drugs have not been through the conventional long process of clinical trials in animals and healthy humans before being given to people who are sick. Also, drugs will not be withheld as part of a control group. The trials have been set up with extraordinary speed in the hope that the drugs will cut the 70% death rate from the disease in west Africa.
MSF and its partners in the trials, who include academics, pharmaceutical companies and the World Health Organisation, have agreed to run two trials in Guinea, one of which will investigate the use of blood products from people who have survived Ebola, with the location of a third still to be decided.
ZMapp, the drug given to some of the foreign health workers who were infected earlier in the epidemic, is not among those being trialled at this stage because it takes too long to produce.
Oxford University scientists will lead the third trial, which is funded by the Wellcome Trust. They will test the antiviral drug brincidofovir, made by Chimerix of Durham in North Carolina, USA. It has shown an effect against the Ebola virus in the lab, but has not been tried in animals. However, there is good evidence of its safety in humans from trials against other viruses and it is easy to take, because it is in pill form. Up to 140 patients will be involved in the first trial and receive five pills over four days.
Sierra Leone health workers remove a corpse from a house in Freetown. Photograph: Francisco Leong/AFP/Getty Images
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