Doctors Without Borders says it will begin clinical trials of Ebola drugs next month at three treatment sites in West Africa. The trials will use “experimental drugs that haven’t been through the usual lengthy process of study with animals and healthy people,” Al-Jazeera says. Each trial will be operated with a different partner and test different remedies:
Oxford’s trial will test the antiviral drug brincidofovir in Liberia.
France’s National Institute of Health and Medical Research will conduct a trial using the antiviral drug favipiravir in Gueckedou, Guinea, and the Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine will test convalescent whole blood and plasma therapy in Guinea.
Results “are expected by February or March.”
New York doctor and Ebola patient Craig Spencer was given brincidofovir, as was freelance cameraman Ashoka Mukpo, who was treated in Nebraska; both recovered. Dallas patient Thomas Eric Duncan also received the drug but still succumbed to the disease. A French nurse who was treated with favipiravir recovered successfully.
