Ebola Outbreak Update: Antibodies Seen as ‘Silver Bullet’ for Viruses

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Ebola virus disease (EVD) has already become the world's concern for some time now. This has first appeared in the year 1976 and is lately going rampant. This EVD is caused by a family of hemorrhagic viruses that have already led over 11,000 people to their deaths, only in a matter of two years in West Africa.

eScience reported that a team of researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston (UTMB) and Vanderbilt University Medical Center has conducted a research on this and published its findings in the Cell journal.

The researchers have secluded human monoclonal antibodies from the Ebola virus survivors, which can neutralize the many species of the said virus. EurekAlert reported that these antibodies that are dubbed as "silver bullet" can defeat the Ebola virus. The researchers have thought that they would need five different drugs or five different sets of vaccines.

"This work suggests there are common elements across different groups of Ebola viruses," James Crowe Jr., M.D., who is also an Ann Scott Carell Professor and director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center, said. "Maybe we can come up with one therapeutic or one vaccine that would solve all of them."

Moreover, Alexander Bukreyev, a UTMB professor, added that "in this study, a remarkably diverse array of virus-specific antibodies was isolated, which appeared to bind to various parts of the envelope protein of the virus."

"Some of the antibodies neutralized not only Ebola Bundibugyo virus, but also Ebola Sudan virus and Ebola Zaire virus, similar to that which caused the recent outbreak in West Africa," he noted.

In this recent study, Vanderbilt researchers, led by graduate student Andrew Flyak, have used a high-efficiency method, which they developed to readily isolate and foster large quantities of monoclonal human antibodies from the blood of survivors who were infected in a 2007 outbreak in Uganda. These people were infected by the so-called Bundibugyo Ebola virus.

The study's components included live viruses to work on, which was performed at the Galvenston National Laboratory at UTMB by Bukreyev's team. The lab has biosafety facilities that are capable of handling the Ebola viruses safely. Furthermore, multiple Ebola virus species are neutralized and one of the antibodies is protecting guinea pigs from a deathly challenge of the virus.

EVD is spread by a mere contact with contaminated body fluids, which include blood and even semen. It can cause immense bleeding.

It is reported that the death rate is about 50 percent, which is basically tragic. The World Health Organization (WHO) has revealed that there have been 24 Ebola outbreaks since it first appeared in 1976 and it was the largest in Guinea in December 2013. There has been 40 percent death rate of the 28,600 people that were affected just this month.