The Ebola virus – a deadly pathogen infecting West African countries like Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leon – has been making headlines for weeks. With the exception of the Texas case, Ebola has not been a personal threat to most U.S. citizens. But for the thousands of residents in New York City, the threat struck much closer to home on October 23 with the news that Dr. Craig Spencer, a volunteer for Doctors without Borders who had returned from Guinea three weeks prior, was reported to have contracted the Ebola virus.
Despite this disconcerting news, there is hope on the horizon for the prevention of Ebola with the discovery of a potential antibody to the Sudan strain of Ebola by Dr. Jonathan Lai, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, in conjunction with Dr. Kartik Chandran, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, also of Einstein. This discovery holds substantial potential for the future containment and cure of the disease.
Observer:
What was the impetus for your collaborative research of treatments for the Ebola virus?
Dr. Lai:
We started working on Ebola about five years ago. We were very interested in studying virus envelope glycoproteins, the proteins that are on the surface of a virus and help it infect cells, and at the time we were focusing on HIV-1. My colleague and friend, Dr. Kartik Chandran, in Einstein’s department of microbiology & immunology, was studying Ebola and came down to my office one day and got me interested in the topic. Kartik and I got along really well and Ebola is an interesting group of viruses, so we have had a long and fruitful collaboration since then. Eventually I began to branch out into antibodies, because we had generally been interested in them as potential therapies for various viruses. We started testing newer antibody technologies on Ebola and found some very interesting results.
O:
What is your main goal in regards to your research?
L:
There are five strains (or species) of Ebola virus, each named according to the region in which it was identified: Zaire, Sudan, Reston, Tai Forest, and Bundibugyo. The Zaire strain is the cause of the current West Africa epidemic. However, some of the other strains (such as Sudan) have also caused large outbreaks in the past and are also quite lethal. There are many potential antibody therapies for the Zaire strain but fewer for the others including Sudan. One of our goals is to identify new and potentially therapeutic antibodies for those other strains, because typically antibodies against one strain are not effective against the others. Also, we would like to try to identify antibodies that can combat multiple strains simultaneously, sort of a broad-spectrum reagent that could be used without having to await viral genotyping results to identify the strain.
We are also quite interested in the “mechanics” of how the envelope glycoprotein helps the virus infect the cell. The glycoprotein has to change its three-dimensional structure in order to allow the virus to gain entry into the cell. We are trying to understand what these structures look like and how they help the virus during infection.
O:
How promising do you feel the progress in antibody research has been?
L:
Other researchers have shown that an antibody cocktail known as ZMapp can cure monkeys up to five days after receiving a lethal dose of Ebola. That is a very promising result, but it does not guarantee that it will be effective in humans. ZMapp has been provided to patients on a compassionate basis in several cases in this current epidemic, but we don’t have enough numbers from a statistical point of view to know if it is effective yet in humans. I am hopeful, but we need to see how the larger clinical data looks before we know if ZMapp (or other antibodies) will work in humans. As for the other strains, it is still early days. Our antibodies against the Sudan strain can cure mice after a lethal viral dose, but we have to be cautious because the real “acid test” will be whether or not they are effective in monkeys.
O:
Do you think the Ebola virus possesses a real threat to the United States?
L:
I agree with other scientists that the West Africa epidemic is a global concern, and that the only way to truly eliminate the possibility of more cases in US and elsewhere will be to contain the outbreak in West Africa.