To include Ebola and unspecified others as far as I can tell from the web site for Alnylam, the company that just won almost $40M from DTRA to do the work.
According to the press release, Alnylam will develop a broad spectrum RNAi antiviral therapeutic for hemorrhagic fever over 33 months. They’re already working on RNAi therapies for Ebola with NIH funds.
Under the current DTRA program, Alnylam will investigate the silencing of endogenous host targets believed to be involved in viral pathogenesis and progression of hemorrhagic fever. Alnylam will produce drug candidates, and the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases will conduct in vitro and in vivo testing. The company believes that the funding will fully support R&D activities up to Phase I trials.
Sure they do! But seriously, Alnylam is no newcomer to developing RNAi therapies—they have done pioneering work in the field and RNAi is their entire product focus. For more info about RNAi, some thrilling bedtime reading may be found at Ambion, Nature, and PLoS Biology, or Google it!
UPDATE: Other DTRA-funded companies using various approaches listed here.
Filed under: RNAi, biotechnology, health, homeland security, infectious disease, medicine, military
And you know what? They’ll get the money. TMTI has been a very political, very cash-rich venture with very low expectations. As long as Alnylam doesn’t dork something up incredibly bad, it will see a good chunk of money for the next 2-3 years. That’s the pattern of typical science and technology programs.
I am not a biologist, but wouldn’t Ebola be too rare to vaccinate against to prevent the disease and burn out to quickly in a population to vaccinate a population after it appears? Wouldn’t finding its vector and animal reservoir be more effective and cheaper? Could we ethically test the vaccines effectiveness?
First I’ll point out that this RNAi therapy is not a vaccine, it is a treatment. Basically it would be used to block the activity of certain (host) genes that may contribute to the virus’s ability to cause disease.
Would it be a good thing to find the ultimate origin of Ebola? Of course, however that knowledge would probably not prevent people from inadvertently contracting the virus so treatments and vaccines are the solution. We know that it appears to have a host range of more than one species of fruit bat, but there may be other natural hosts as well. As to your question of whether it would burn itself out before treatments could do any good, actually there are now very promising treatments for both Marburg and Ebola that can prevent illness or death, and that’s post-exposure. These have not yet been tested in humans but the animal tests so far indicate that finding treatments for these VHFs is anything but hopeless.
We can ethically test vaccines, of course, because they are not pathogenic. There is a lot of work being done today in recombinant vaccines, which use a harmless virus to carry select nonpathogenic genes from the disease virus that the immune system will respond to. An Ebola vaccine has already completed a Phase I human clinical trial, in fact and a multiple-strain Marburg vaccine has so far been tested in monkeys. There may be other trials and research programs ongoing but I’m just aware of these.
Hope this helps answer your questions.