WHO assesses experimental interventions on Ebola

By Park Sae-jin Posted : December 3, 2014, 17:09 Updated : December 3, 2014, 17:09

 

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday released an update on discussions over Ebola experimental interventions, highlighting the necessity to quicken clinical trial of blood products and medicines to address the Ebola outbreaks.

To facilitate and accelerate the appropriate clinical testing and generation of quality date of potential therapeutic interventions for Ebola virus disease, WHO convened a meeting of the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee for Ebola Experimental Interventions (STAC-EE) in Geneva on Nov. 11-12.

According to a statement issued by WHO, data did not permit evaluation of efficacy of interventions applied to whom were evacuated from West Africa to well-resourced facilities in other countries, and the comparatively high survival rate observed in these patients may be due to a variety of factors including the high standard of care they received.

"Because they all received various of mixed drugs, it was impossible to draw any conclusion, either onto the safety of these experimental drugs, or onto the efficacy of these drugs," Martin Friede, who's in charge of WHO's work on Ebola drugs, told a press conference, adding that it is very clear that good standard of care can contribute significantly to improve survival.

WHO noted the Phrase 1 of clinical trials of convalescent whole blood and convalescent plasma that are ready to start in two affected countries.

"There is actually not tremendous amount of evidence that convalescent blood or plasma is efficacious, therefore this does need to be tested," Friede said.

He said the first challenge in doing this is getting quality and safe blood from patients that recovered from Ebola and he admitted infrastructure of West Africa countries to gather, collect and treat the blood is very limited.

In terms of proposals for potential products against Ebola from the scientific community, WHO said many of these have already been tested and shown to have no activity against the virus.

WHO added one such product, the antiretroviral lamivudine, has been used in some of the affected countries, has no antiviral activity against Ebola and should therefore not be administered for the treatment of Ebola.

Since many products at various stages of development and with varying degrees of supportive date, STAC-EE developed a set of criteria regarding minimal preclinical and clinical date that should be met in order for a product to be considered for inclusion in clinical trials.

By Ruchi Singh
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