Promising Ebola drugs trapped in a ‘biotech valley of death’

The news that yet another American, New York City physician Craig Spencer, has tested positive for Ebola has stoked an already intense debate and why there is no effective drug and what can be done about it. The World Health Organization announced that large-scale clinical trials will start in January, 2015 in hopes of launching large scale vaccinations against Ebola. Why does it seem we are just beginning this effort?

As The New York Times reported last week, testing and scaling up the production of drugs takes time and especially money. It can cost $1.5 billion or more to bring a new vaccine to market. The Times’ Dense Gray tells the story of an Ebola vaccine developed a decade ago that was 100 percent effective in monkeys, and could have been ready for human use years ago—if only money was available for development. Instead, it sits on the shelf. There wasn’t enough anticipated demand to justify that huge investment, so promising drugs often never moved through the development pipeline, with only a humanitarian disaster able to generate the necessary urgency to act.

Many promising vaccines end up in what researchers call the “biotech valley of death”. “There’s never been a big market for Ebola vaccines,” said Thomas W. Geisbert, an Ebola expert here at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, and one of the developers of the vaccine that worked so well in monkeys. “So big pharma, who are they going to sell it to?” Geisbert added: “It takes a crisis sometimes to get people talking. ‘O.K. We’ve got to do something here.’ ”

The drug for monkeys, which researchers hope will be jumpstarted in a new form designed to create fewer side effects, was made by removing one of the genes from a different virus, rendering it harmless, and inserting a gene from Ebola. The transplanted gene creates Ebola proteins that cannot cause illness, but provoke an immune response that in monkeys, considered a good surrogate for humans, fought off the disease.

Leave a Reply

glp menu logo outlined

Newsletter Subscription

* indicates required
Email Lists
glp menu logo outlined

Get news on human & agricultural genetics and biotechnology delivered to your inbox.