Yahoo – AFP,
26 Feb 2015
Miami (AFP) - A small molecule derived from an Asian herb may help stop Ebola infection by preventing the virus from entering the cells of the body, researchers said Thursday.
A health
worker wearing protective equipment assists an Ebola patient at the
Kenama
treatment center in Sierra Leone, on November 15, 2014 (AFP Photo/
Francisco
Leong)
|
Miami (AFP) - A small molecule derived from an Asian herb may help stop Ebola infection by preventing the virus from entering the cells of the body, researchers said Thursday.
So far the
research using the calcium channel blocker Tetrandrine, found in some Chinese
and Japanese herbs, against Ebola has only been done in lab animals and in
petri dishes.
However,
the findings so far warrant tests in primates before possibly being tried in
people, said the authors of the study in the journal Science.
Researchers
studied several existing drugs currently used to treat high blood pressure in
order to find out which small molecules were best at blocking the Ebola virus
from moving any further through the cell.
Tetrandrine
protected mice from disease without obvious side effects, and appeared to be
the most potent of the compounds tested.
"When
we tested in mice, the drugs stopped virus replication and saved most of them
from disease," said Robert Davey, scientist and Ewing Halsell Scholar in
the Department of Immunology and Virology at Texas Biomedical Research
Institute.
"We
are very excited about the progress made in this study and the momentum it
provides as scientists across the world vigorously search for effective
vaccines and treatments against Ebola virus," Davey said.
There is no
drug on the market to treat Ebola, which has killed more than 9,000 people,
mainly in West Africa, since 2013 in the world's largest outbreak to date.
"We
are cautiously optimistic. The next step in the process is to test both safety
and effectiveness of the interaction of the drug with Ebola virus in non-human
primates," said Davey.
Co-authors
on the research came from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston;
the Center for Integrated Protein Science Munich (CIPSM) at
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat München in Munich, Germany; and the Southwest
Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
No comments:
Post a Comment