After years of research, experts from the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases have identified two drugs that have an impact on the Ebola virus, one of the most contagious and deadly in the world. Patients usually died after a few days of hemorrhagic fever, without any treatment to help them. This is why this discovery, revealed by the journal Science Translational Medicine is so important for future patients.
After analyzing the effect of more than 2,000 drugs on the virus, the researchers identified two sex hormone modulating drugs capable of blocking the virus: clomiphene, a treatment used in infertility, and toremifene, prescribed for fight breast cancer.
Experiments were carried out on about thirty mice. One hour after having infected them with the Ebola virus, twenty of them were entitled to a dose of clomiphene or toremifene. Those who did not receive medication died within a week. But of the rest, nine out of ten mice given clomiphene were alive after one month. For the ten mice treated with toremifene, five died after ten days and the other five lived for a month.
These promising results will have to be analyzed again and tested in non-human primates before a human clinical trial is set up.
