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Thomas Geisbert spent the ’90s scraping together funds to work on an Ebola cure. Occasionally, he’d get enough to test a potential vaccine in primates, but the monkeys always died. There was just never enough money. The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Dick Cheney helped change that. Cheney, then the vice president, said he feared assaults by bioterrorists could be far more devastating than what happened that day, and became an advocate in the George W. Bush White House At least seven drugs now being tested -- including some used to treat Ebola victims in the U.S. -- grew...

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Judith White, who runs a research lab at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, submitted a proposal to the National Institutes of Health to test potential countermeasures against Ebola in March — just as Liberia was confirming its first two cases of the deadly virus. The project, a collaboration of the university, the Army and a drug company, showed promising early results: Mice injected with two compounds — one used in a drug to treat female infertility, the other found in a breast cancer drug — showed immunity to Ebola. But a few months later, not...

FORT WORTH, Texas — The family of the first Ebola victim to die in the United States says the hospital that cared for him has refused for weeks to release lab results showing the effects of an experimental drug treatment, fanning their suspicions that the facility mishandled the case. They believe that information is being withheld, along with additional medical records, by Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, where Thomas Eric Duncan died Oct. 8....

We have technology to potentially control Ebola and other viral outbreaks today. But the federal bureaucracy refuses to catch up with 21st-century science. For example, diagnostic startup Nanobiosym has an iPhone-sized device that can accurately detect Ebola and other infectious diseases in less than an hour. Two other companies, Synthetic Genomics and Novartis, have the capacity to create synthetic vaccine viruses for influenza and other infectious diseases in only four days. Both firms can also share data about outbreaks instantaneously and make real-time, geographically specific diagnosis and vaccine production possible. These companies could start producing Ebola vaccine/treatments tomorrow — except...

US Ebola Death: Antivirals Submitted by admin on Wed, 10/08/2014 - 13:19 The first U.S. Ebola patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, has died despite being administered the experimental nucleoside-type antiviral pro-drug Brincidofovir.  How is this possible?  Well , the first problem is that Duncan was not treated until it was far too late for antiviral therapy to work.  Let's take this opportunity to look at some nucleoside antivirals, incuding the drug that was administered to Mr. Duncan in Dallas, TX (Brincidofovir).The first thing to know is remember Brincidofovir and Cidofovir were developed to work against dsDNA Viruses, though Ebola is a...