Profit motive big hurdle for Ebola drugs, experts say

A nurse wears protective clothing as he demonstrates the facilities in place at the Royal Free Hospital in north London on August 6, 2014, in preparation for a patient testing positive for the Ebola virus. Money has stood in the way of erasing the Ebola virus, experts say. PHOTO | LEON NEAL |

What you need to know:

  • Despite its evil reputation, Ebola breaks out only rarely in brief if murderous spurts in impoverished African countries.
  • Sylvain Baize, in charge of the Viral Haemorrhagic Fevers Reference Centre at France’s Pasteur Institute, said Ebola had claimed fewer than 2,000 lives in almost 40 years, a minute toll compared with other diseases.

PARIS, Saturday

For nearly four decades, mention of the Ebola virus has evoked death and terror, yet a simple factor — money — has stood in the way of erasing the curse, experts say.

Despite its evil reputation, Ebola breaks out only rarely in brief if murderous spurts in impoverished African countries.

That tiny — and poor — market means the disease has been a very low priority for Big Pharma, given the hundreds of millions of dollars it can take to devise a new drug or vaccine.

Today, after years of low-key progress with the Pentagon as main funder, the search for vaccines and drugs has been thrown into higher gear and, for now, the profit factor has been put to one side.

“Until this epidemic, Ebola was not a public health problem and (was) a really rare disease,” says Professor Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who co-discovered the Ebola virus in 1976.

“There was very little interest in all quarters, not just pharma,” Piot said in an email to AFP.

“Things have changed now, and two major companies are investing in a vaccine — GSK (GlaxoSmithKline) and (Johnson & Johnson subsidiary) Janssen.”

Sylvain Baize, in charge of the Viral Haemorrhagic Fevers Reference Centre at France’s Pasteur Institute, said Ebola had claimed fewer than 2,000 lives in almost 40 years, a minute toll compared with other diseases.

“If these 2,000 deaths had occurred in industrialised countries, things may have been different, but it was 2,000 dead in the middle of Africa, so nobody cared very much,” Baize said sardonically.

Ebola’s extraordinary lethality was another reason why it never became a top target for research, he said.

“It has to be confined in a top-security P4 laboratory, of which there are very few in the world, so there are not many people who in fact can work on it,” Baize said.