SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Ebola deaths are rising in East Africa. The World Health Organization says there are now almost 600 suspected cases and 139 suspected deaths.
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RON KLAIN: This is a strain of Ebola for which we have no vaccine and no treatments.
DETROW: That is Obama-era Ebola czar, Ron Klain, talking about how high the stakes are in this current outbreak. He joined me on the show yesterday to talk about the global response to 2014's Ebola virus outbreak, the largest on record. A vaccine eventually helped bring that outbreak under control, but as we heard, there is no vaccine for this current and more rare species of Ebola. So what will it take to develop one? To talk about this, I am joined by Dr. Thomas Geisbert. He is a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Dr. Geisbert, thanks for talking to us.
THOMAS GEISBERT: Oh, you're welcome. Great to be here today.
DETROW: You played a big role in helping to resolve the 2014 outbreak, and I'm wondering what is going on in labs right now.
GEISBERT: Yeah. I think all of us that work on Ebola viruses are trying our best to work on developing vaccines and treatments that hopefully could be used to assist this outbreak and potentially future outbreaks.
DETROW: All of us who lived on Earth during COVID know how long it takes to develop a vaccine, even under extreme fast-track circumstances like that. What is the timeline here that we could be working on?
GEISBERT: I think the best example that we have for an outbreak like this was the 2014-15 epidemic of Ebola virus in West Africa where, you know, we had a vaccine that had promising data in nonhuman primates and animal studies, and Merck, fortunately, stepped up and decided to develop a human-grade vaccine that could be used. And that took about eight to nine months from the time it started to the time that it was used in that outbreak in 2015.
DETROW: I mean, that's a long period of time, given the case numbers and deaths that we're already seeing. What is the best approach to bridge to the point when a vaccine is available from the public health point of view?
GEISBERT: Yeah. I think one of the things - we do have antiviral drugs that could potentially be used during this outbreak to bridge that gap. There's a drug by Gilead called Obeldesivir, and that drug actually can be given orally, which is an advantage. And we've shown, theoretically, it should work. You know, that's something that is maybe under consideration or could be looked at.
DETROW: I'm curious. Just knowing how much of a breakthrough they were with the COVID vaccine, the developments in mRNA technology, are those something that could potentially be of value here?
GEISBERT: Potentially. But I think it's challenging with mRNA vaccines. And the reason is when you go into an outbreak, the reason the vaccine works so well during the Ebola outbreak in 2014 and '15 is because it works quickly. And so if you give the vaccine within a few days to a week, that vaccine is already going to protect somebody. The mRNA vaccines, as you probably know, a lot of them - most of them require multiple injections. In an outbreak, you need to, you know, really knock the virus out quickly. And in this case, I think it would be difficult for an mRNA vaccine to do that.
DETROW: What are the biggest challenges here, other than just the time that it takes to develop something like this?
GEISBERT: Obviously funding, right? You know, historically, there's been a very small global market for vaccines for these types of viruses. And I don't care whether, you know, you're talking Andes, you're talking Ebola, Marburg, all of these kinds of viruses, there really is not an incentive for big pharmaceutical companies to do this because they're not moneymakers. So it really requires NGOs, things like that, to really step up and help out. But, you know, I've learned that it's a really long process and a really expensive process with a whole bunch of zeros behind it.
DETROW: Yeah. That is University of Texas virologist and Ebola expert Dr. Thomas Geisbert. Thank you so much.
GEISBERT: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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