The most recent viral outbreak of Ebola taking place in central Africa shows us yet again that our health care agencies are not prepared to deal with a deadly virus. Recent reports should be concerning: this is the third largest Ebola epidemic ever and the virus is now present in cities which wi ll greatly speed its spread.  I’m not buying the reassurances that the virus will stay put in Africa- we heard similar pronouncements in the early days of COVID.  Yes, COVID is more easily transmitted than Ebola, but Ebola has a longer incubation period of up to 21 days which makes an infection harder to track.  A few weeks ago, we worried about a hantavirus outbreak although only a handful of people died.  We’re still losing between 30-50,000 people per year in this country to COVID 19 while even more people are hospitalized for influenza.  Ebola could be far, far worse.  This current version isn’t as fatal as the Zaire version which can kill more than half of its victims as this Bundigbuyo variant only kills about 20% of the people it infects, but perhaps a bit paradoxically, the greater survival rate means that it is more likely to spread.  Isn’t there a sense of déjà vu? The old adage of “Those who do not learn from the lessons of history will be given another chance” is very appropriate here.  While some people blame recent USAID cuts for the outbreak, a more reasoned analysis shows that this was essentially coincidental.  Even if the region had been receiving U.S. dollars, the outbreak would still be occurring and our response would be to simply wring our hands.  We’d probably have a somewhat better handle on how fast the disease was spreading, but we’d still be unable to stop it.  Why?  Do we lack the technology to prevent fast moving outbreaks?  Or do we lack the political will to use it? There are two types of medicines that can control viral infections: antiviral drugs and vaccines although rapid testing (~1 minute) is critical as well.  (As a short digression, imagine if we could have identified people with COVID infections quickly and easily instead of wasting time with taking temperatures which didn’t work anyhow.  Wouldn’t that have done a lot to slow the spread of the virus?)    Vaccines and antiviral drugs are different technologies which each have their strengths and weaknesses.  Vaccines tend to be cheaper and can prevent an infection from getting started in the first place for a long time, but they’re useless if you already have an infection since they take weeks or longer to work. Vaccines are very specific to the virus- if the virus mutates, the vaccine can become much less effective which is what we’ve seen with influenza and COVID-19.  (There’s more to this story but it’s a digression.)  This current Ebola outbreak is yet another example of how the specificity of vaccines isn’t helpful when you’re trying to limit the spread of a virus.  We have a vaccine for Ebola, unfortunately it’s just for the Zaire variant, not the Bundigbuyo variant which we thought was much less common and therefore not as dangerous.  Given the current size of this outbreak: oops….  It’s not likely that vaccines (or antibodies for that matter) for the Zaire variant are going to be helpful now. That’s what Merck, one of the vaccine manufacturers says. The technology you don’t hear so much about are antiviral drugs.  Drugs tend to be more expensive than vaccines on a per-human basis, but on the plus side, you only need the drugs to treat people who are infected. And if the drug can be used prophylactically then you can help protect people who are likely to become infected- like the health care workers who are now dying from Ebola.  Drugs used prophylactically don’t provide long term protection, they have to be in your system when you get exposed to the virus to prevent an infection.  Clearly though, to deal with the urgency of a fast moving outbreak, having an effective antiviral drug would be really, really helpful as would rapid testing. Antiviral drugs can be highly specific like vaccines, tailored to a particular feature of a virus or they can be broad spectrum, meaning that they’ll work to treat infections from several different viruses or more.  If the antiviral drug is highly specific and the feature that it targets goes away due to mutation, the drug doesn’t work any longer.  But now we’ve got what should have been the “holy grail” of antiviral drugs- broad spectrum compounds that work on multiple types of viruses.  Well, these drugs should be the holy grail except that public health organizations like the CDC and WHO have an overly narrow focus on vaccines and don’t want to use them. How would you feel if you learned that there are doses of a broad spectrum antiviral drug that’s just sitting at a company in Shelton, CT that could help save lives of people with an Ebola infection as well as health care workers who might get exposed?  What I’m about to tell you sounds like it belongs in a Hollywood thriller with dashing hero figures and evil henchmen along with beautiful doctors looking wan and exhausted.  The sad thing is its truth, not fiction. There’s been a lot of progress in the development of antiviral drugs over the past few decades.  One approach which makes intuitive sense is to prevent the virus from ever entering the cell.  Drugs that do this are called appropriately enough: viral entry blockers.  There have been several viral entry blockers that have been commercialized to treat AIDS patients when their current drugs begin failing but they are all highly specific.  Two of the newest are Ibalizumab and Fostemavir.  The drugs work against HIV but can be difficult to take.  No help against Ebola. But there’s also been progress in broad spectrum antiviral drugs that work against many different viruses including Ebola.  In Switzerland, Francesco Stellacci’s laboratory has been showing that nanoparticles which use lots of weak interactions rather than a single strong interaction can still bind tightly enough to viruses to deactivate them but aren’t toxic which makes them easy to take.  Independently, Dr. Anil Diwan, founder of NanoViricides (full disclosure- I’m a long term shareholder) developed similar technology which is progressing towards commercialization.  A couple of years ago, a Phase 1 trial in India showed that the company’s lead compound, NV-387, was very well tolerated in human subjects.  The company has done experiments in animals which show that the drug is effective against a number of viruses: measles, SARS CoV-2, influenza-A, and mpox.  The FDA recently gave NV-387 an orphan drug designation for measles prior to approval and this same drug is soon to be in a Phase 2 clinical trial to show efficacy against mpox.  Similar compounds developed by NanoViricides have been effective in animal models against HIV, Ebola, dengue and others.  In short, NV-387 is about as ready to go against Ebola as any experimental drug could be.  Why is this interest in an antiviral drug to treat Ebola not being translated into demand from organizations like the Centers for Disease Control, the WHO or Medicines Sans Frontieres (aka Doctors Without Borders)? If you look at the CDC’s website, there’s lots of discussion about vaccines- but not very much about antiviral drugs or rapid testing and certainly not in their descriptions of how to prevent epidemics.  Why not?  Imagine if we had good quantities of NV-387 on hand right now.  Couldn’t we simply begin administering the drug to people with an infection?  That would help break the chain of infection.  It’s not hard to take- it’s a gummy, you can simply suck on it.  Why are we so dependent on vaccines which generally take years to develop and aren’t effective against existing infections?  Yes, vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives, but they’re not the only game in town. I think we need to be asking some tougher questions of the people at the CDC and other health care organizations. I’m tired of reading about hundreds of people dying needlessly and the worry that we might have another pandemic with something a lot deadlier than COVID-19- like Ebola.  Aren’t you? Samuel Brauer, the founder of Nanotech Plus, LLC, lives in Shelton. ...read more read less