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. Initially to research Lassa virus - a similar hemorrhagic fever - specifically to develop diagnostic testing. Although the initial focus was Lassa, Garry states that prior to the Ebola outbreak, they had also been working on Ebola in Kenema:
We had started some projects on Ebola just to extend what we'd learned about Lassa to this other very serious disease.
Garry supplies no further details of these projects on Ebola - no research was published. It does indicate that the Consortium had samples of the Ebola virus - in order to work on it.
As always, the point of these studies, according to the Consortium’s website (administered by Andersen), was to develop countermeasures against bioterrorism.
Speaking of which, around the time of the Ebola outbreak, before the first cases were made public, came this announcement:
VANCOUVER, 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 if you can get it! 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:
- The trial was conducted in Sierra Leone
- The compelling preclinical results claimed 100% efficacy in non-human primates - using the Zaire version of Ebola known as Kikwit-95 to infect macaques.
- The data never did become available. Including details of how the trial subjects were tested or tolerability (adverse effects).
- Tekmira experienced a huge stockmarket surge due to the drug x DoD deal.
Following the outbreak 2014, Tekmira tweaked 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): It is a great tribute to the team in Sierra Leone that the trial has been run so efficiently and that we now have substantial experience on the use of TKM-Ebola-Guinea in patients with Ebola. While the trial has reached a statistical endpoint, final conclusions on the efficacy and tolerability of the drug must await full analysis of the data.
So what does statistical endpoint mean exactly? Hope you don't mean the subjects met a statistical endpoint ...
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 is still must awaiting publication.
Then there’s this: Tekmira’s TKM-Ebola (subsequent) 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 thereabouts in the Ebola 14 outbreak. If the plot gets any thicker we could stand a spoon up in it.