Breaking News: Ebola

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As the world grapples with COVID-19, the Ebola virus is again raging. A research team at University of Delaware is using supercomputers to simulate the inner workings of Ebola (as well as COVID-19), looking at how molecules move, atom by atom, to carry out their functions. Now, they have revealed structural features of the Ebola virus’s protein shell to provide therapeutic targets to destabilize the virus and knock it out with an antiviral treatment.

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Scientists at the University of Delaware report a computational study of a nucleocapsid found in the Ebola virus and show that the binding of the ssRNA allows the nucleocapsid to maintain its shape and structural integrity.

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Even after heroic medical and societal efforts finally break the back of the current COVID-19 pandemic, the global sigh of relief may not last long. The chilling reality is that viral threats are growing more common. And they’re getting deadlier.

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Global health scholars have issued a clarion call about the needless loss of life expected because of a foreseeable prospect of “slow and inadequate access to supplies” to control COVID-19 in sub-Saharan Africa. They say what is unfolding now is similar to when lifesaving diagnostics and treatments came to the region long after they were available elsewhere.

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Each year since 2008, SCT has awarded the David Sackett Trial of the Year Award to a randomized, controlled trial published (either electronically or in print) in the previous calendar year. The 2020 recipient is Pamoja Tulinde Maisha (PALM [“Together Save Lives”] in the Kiswahili language) trial.

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UCLA Health is one of 75 sites around the globe participating in a clinical trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health to test the effectiveness of a candidate anti-viral drug against COVID-19.

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After the Ebola virus tore through western Africa in 2015, two UC Santa Barbara researchers studied the xenophobia of the disease generated among people who had almost zero chance of being infected by it.

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A group of University of Alberta researchers who have discovered why the drug remdesivir is effective in treating the coronaviruses that cause Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) expect it might also be effective for treating patients infected with the new COVID-19 strain.

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Liberia was the epicenter of a high-profile Ebola outbreak in 2014-15, which led to more than 10,000 deaths in West Africa.

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Interacting contagious diseases like influenza and pneumonia—and perhaps coronavirus too—follow the same complex spreading patterns as social trends, like the adoption of new slang or technologies. This new finding, published in Nature Physics, could lead to better tracking and intervention when multiple diseases spread through a population at the same time.

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Robert Stahelin studies some of the world’s deadliest viruses. Filoviruses, including Ebola virus and Marburg virus, cause viral hemorrhagic fever with high fatality rates. Stahelin, professor at Purdue University, examines how these viruses take advantage of human host cells.

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It's no coincidence that some of the worst viral disease outbreaks in recent years -- SARS, MERS, Ebola, Marburg and likely the newly arrived 2019-nCoV virus -- originated in bats.

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A device to quickly capture and identify various strains of virus has been developed, according to researchers at Penn State and New York University.

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Scientists using specialized beamlines at Argonne's Structural Biology Center (SBC), a facility for macromolecular crystallography at the Advanced Photon Source, derived insights that led to the discovery of a promising new drug for Ebola.

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La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) is placing their confidence in Berkeley Lights’ Beacon® Optofluidic Platform and B cell antibody discovery workflow to accelerate the discovery of rare and lifesaving antibodies for the treatment of re-emerging and emerging diseases.

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In mid-August 2019, human clinical trials were halted in the current Ebola epidemic that has claimed more than 2,100 lives in Africa. The findings resulted in the discontinuation of two of the drugs in the trial. Future patients will be randomly assigned to receive either REGN-EB3 (Regeneron) or mAb114 (Ridgeback Biotherapeutics) in an extension phase of the study. Texas Biomedical Research Institute scientists in the Institute’s Biosafety Level 4 contract research program conducted preclinical testing of several of the compounds in the trial, working with Regeneron and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).

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WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society) and NIH (National Institutes of Health) scientists partnered with the Republic of Congo Ministry of Health to develop a low-cost educational outreach program and surveillance system for wildlife mortality that has continued now for over a decade.