Progress Made Toward Vaccine for Ebola Virus

On August 26, 1976, a time bomb exploded in Yambuku, a remote village in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). A threadlike virus known as Ebola had emerged, soon earning grim distinction as one of the most lethal, naturally occurring pathogens on earth, killing up to 90 percent of its victims, and producing a terrifying constellation of symptoms known as hemorrhagic fever. Now, Dr. Charles Arntzen, a researcher at the Biodesign Institute® at Arizona State University (ASU), along with colleagues from ASU, the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix, and the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, Fort Detrick, Maryland, have made progress toward a vaccine against the deadly virus. The group's research results appear online on December 5, 2011 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, along with a companion paper by their collaborators at Mapp Pharmaceuticals in San Diego, California, led by Dr. Larry Zeitlin. Dr. Arntzen's group demonstrated that a plant-derived vaccine for Ebola provided strong immunological protection in a mouse model. If early efforts bear fruit, an Ebola vaccine could be stockpiled for use in the United States, should the country fall victim to a natural outbreak or a bioterrorism event in which a weaponized strain of the virus were unleashed on soldiers or the public. To date, Ebola outbreaks have been mercifully rare. For researchers like Dr. Arntzen however, this presents a challenge: "With other lethal viruses like HIV, there is a common pattern of occurrence, allowing for vaccine testing. For example, an AIDS vaccine study is now underway at two locations in Thailand, which were chosen because of a current high incidence of the disease." By contrast, Ebola events are fleeting, episodic, and largely unpredictable. For this reason, Dr.