Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have identified 53 drugs approved for use in treating depression, cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses that may also be effective in fighting the Ebola virus. The findings appeared online in the December 17, 2014, journal Emerging Microbes & Infections.
The Mount Sinai researchers, working in collaboration with the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) at the National Institutes of Health, used viral-like particles (VLP) that mimic the Ebola virus to carry out an Ebola drug repurposing screen. By using Ebola VLPs, the team—that included scientists from Mount Sinai’s Department of Microbiology and the Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute—was able to study the entry mechanism of the virus without using the virus itself, which requires the highest biosafety-level conditions.
The 53 drugs were culled from a total of 2,816 drugs that were initially tested for their ability to block Ebola VLP entry without being toxic to humans.
“If some of these prove to be correct, it will be a fast way to find one or more compounds that can be used to treat Ebola,” says lead author Adolfo García-Sastre, PhD, Director of the Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute, and the Irene and Dr. Arthur M. Fishberg Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases), and Professor of Microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
According to Carles Martínez-Romero, PhD, an instructor in the García-Sastre lab and a lead researcher in the study, compounds that have been identified as promising will require further testing before they can proceed to clinical trials in humans. They would also be used with other antiviral drugs to maximize potency. He says the researchers are planning to test the 400,000 compounds that comprise the NCATS’ entire library of compounds to find even more Ebola-fighting candidates.
“NCATS is all about getting more treatments to more patients more quickly, and this is never more urgent than in the case of a public health emergency like Ebola,” says Christopher P. Austin, MD, Director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. “This remarkable team of scientists combined NCATS’ expertise in drug screening and development with Mount Sinai’s expertise in Ebola virology to rapidly identify candidate treatments for Ebola infection.”
To date, more than 8,000 people in West Africa have died from the virus. The first large-scale trials of experimental Ebola vaccines from two U.S. drug companies recently began in Liberia.