New study may show direction for relevant pharmaceutical researchers of Ebola virus

The Ebola virus which began to spread in West Africa since 2013 is the most serious outbreak of Ebola haemorrhagic fever by far. It has made nearly 30,000 people sick and more than 10,000 deaths, leaving millions of people with the most horrible memories. Although the epidemic has subsided, the high mortality rate of Ebola haemorrhagic fever is very high and still has no effective treatment. Thus, once comeback, it still could result in disastrous consequences. Therefore, researchers from all the nations were nose to the grindstone and are racing against time to develop drugs for the treatments of Ebola hemorrhagic fever. And a new study is expected to indicate a new direction for the relevant pharmaceutical researchers. There used to have some vaccine technologies using recombinant mouse proteins and recombinant rat proteins and they had also won success in animal experiments.

There had been computer simulation, in-vitro and animal studies suggested that some drugs which had been approved for the treatment of other diseases may have certain inhibiting effect on Ebola virus, but the functional mechanism of these drugs was unclear. Researchers from the United Kingdom indicated through experiments that the common painkiller ibuprofen and chemotherapeutic drug Toremifene can be combined with glycoprotein in Ebola virus and reduce its stability. The researchers used X-ray to measure the structures of glycoproteins of Ebola virus before and after they interacted with the two drugs and to determine the parts where drugs interact with glycoproteins. When the Ebola virus tries to infect host cells, it first needs to use its own glycoprotein to adsorb onto the host cells, so many researchers take glycoprotein of Ebola virus as an important target for drug development. Then recombinant animal proteins such as recombinant horse proteins can play their roles in the research.

This study is exciting, because drug-developers can specifically develop the drug treatment of Ebola haemorrhagic fever according the information of these structures. In particular for the drugs which have been approved for marketing, if they are possible to inhibit Ebola virus, the time required for clinical trials may be significantly shorter than new drugs, because the safety of these drugs have been shown without the need of validation through clinical trials. But the experts also warned it still needs a lot of time for us to develop effective drugs, especially the two drugs ibuprofen and toremifene mentioned by the study may not really be able to have effect on the treatment of Ebola hemorrhagic fever in clinical trials. Flarebio is a biocompany which produces recombinant proteins such as recombinant APP of good quality.