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The Consortium

What they don’t mention in the Nature article is that Tulane University (Robert Garry) and Scripps (Andersen) which formed the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium had : established research programs in three West African countries, namely Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Nigeria, which provide clinical and laboratory resources for the studies on viral hemorrhagic fever. (Constantine Nana, The Ebola Outbreak in West Africa: Why? p27) This included a research lab in the Kenema Government Hospital in Sierra Leone.

The Consortium was funded by NIH to the tune of $15 mil from 2010-2014 to research treatments and vaccines.

As always, the point of these studies, according to the Consortium’s website (administered by Andersen), was to develop countermeasures against bioterrorism.

Interestingly, around the time of the Ebola outbreak, before the first cases were made public, came this announcement:

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Jan. 14, 2014 GLOBE NEWSWIRE -- Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corporation (Nasdaq:TKMR) (TSX:TKM), a leading developer of RNA interference (RNAi) therapeutics, today announced that it has dosed the first subject in a Phase I human clinical trial of TKM-Ebola, an anti-Ebola viral therapeutic that is being developed under a US$140 million contract with the U.S. Department of Defense.

Nice money!  Since Anthrax, if your project has got anything to do with the non-existent threat of bioterrorism, then there’s a bottomless pit of public money to support it. 

Dr. Mark J. Murray, Tekmira's President and CEO:  Building upon our compelling preclinical results, the Phase I data generated will guide our determination of the appropriate dose of this drug for the potential use as a medical countermeasure against this lethal hemorrhagic fever virus. We remain on track to have data from this trial available in the second half of this year.

Four things: 

  1. The trial was conducted in Sierra Leone using the Zaire version of Ebola known as Kikwit-95 - meaning this version was present in laboratories in Sierra Leone at the time of the outbreak.  Sierra Leone had never previously recorded a case of Ebola.
  2. The compelling preclinical results indicate the drug was tested prior to Jan 2014
  3. The data never did become available.  Including details of how the trial subjects were tested.
  4. Tekmira experienced a huge stockmarket surge due to the drug.

Following the outbreak of 2013-14, Tekmira redesigned their RNAi drug to target the Guinea version of Ebola, but the trial was unceremoniously halted due to a lack of efficacy.

Peter Horby, Oxford, study head (June 2015): The drug has not demonstrated an overall therapeutic benefit. But we need time to look at all the data to interpret that in the context of the patient mix and other variables.  Final conclusions on efficacy and tolerability must await full analysis.

That analysis never arrived, though the statement suggests that apart from a lack of efficacy there may have been adverse effects as well.

Then there’s this: Tekmira’s TKM-Ebola trials in Guinea started .. with financial and other support from British NGO Wellcome Trust

Hmm. So we’ve got Andersen, Garry, Holmes, Rambaut, Oxford (Horby - head of the RECOVERY trial coordinated by Farrar that killed-off Hydroxy by overdosing the trial patients),  Springer Nature (Stefan Von Holtzbrinck  - his father was publisher for the Nazis), and Wellcome Trust (Farrar).

All deeply involved with the Ebola outbreak. If the plot gets any thicker we could stand a spoon up in it. 

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