Cancer Drugs Thwart Ebola In Lab

The Ebola virus causes a hemorrhagic fever that can be deadly.

hide captionThe Ebola virus causes a hemorrhagic fever that can be deadly.

Frederick Murphy/CDC

Ebola is one virus you never want to catch. Ever.



Sounds wild. But there's a reason — and now some evidence — to think it might work.




"Proteins are like little machines," says Emory University's Dan Kalman, one of the researchers. "As with a machine, they can be turned or turned off. The switch for turning things on or off is a modification. And one of those modifications is a phosphate group."


When it comes to Ebola, the researchers think drugs like these could turn off a transport protein and could keep new viruses bottled up inside cells.

The Ebola lab work using collections of human cells was published in the latest issue of Science Translational Medicine. It showed that the drugs dramatically decrease the ability of Ebola to replicate. "The effect was quite pronounced," Kalman told Shots.

And, if the theory holds, such a reduction might be enough to allow an infected person's immune system to mop up the Ebola viruses.

"Ebola is a very nasty infection," Kalman says. "The whole concept of containing the disease in a local group before it spreads all over the planet is something clearly we want to do."





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