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The University Clinic where an Ebola
patient arrived for treatment is seen in Frankfurt am Main, central Germany on
October 3, 2014 ©Daniel Roland (AFP)
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German doctors on Friday gave
details of how an experimental drug together with advanced intensive care
helped save a Ugandan physician who had been airlifted from Sierra Leone with
Ebola, AFP reports.
A prototype drug called FX06,
designed to stop haemorrhage, was given to the patient after the doctors got
special authorization from their hospital's ethics committee, they reported in
The Lancet.
"Even though the patient was
critically ill, we were able to support him long enough for his body to start
antibody production and for the virus to be cleared by his body's
defences," said Timo Wolf of University Hospital Frankfurt.
The Frankfurt team and the makers of
the experimental drug had announced its use in early November. Publication in
The Lancet, a leading peer-reviewed medical journal, validates this
announcement.
The unnamed 38-year-old male doctor
had been airlifted to Frankfurt in early October, five days after the onset of
Ebola symptoms, and admitted to a Biosafety 4 facility, the highest level of
medical security, the study said.
Within three days of admission, he
was suffering from failure of the lungs, kidneys and gastro-intestinal tract,
as well as haemorrhaging blood vessels, a hallmark of Ebola infection.
He was placed on a ventilator and
kidney dialysis and administered with antibiotics and a three-day course of
FX06.
Called a fibrin-derived peptide,
FX06 is designed to seal off the walls of blood vessels, which become permeable
when infected by a haemorrhagic virus.
The peptide works by binding to the
surface of endothelial cells, which form the inner cell layer of blood vessels.
It latches onto the cells via a target called VE-cadherin.
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Medical staff wearing protective
clothes are seen during the arrival of an Ebola patient at the isolation ward
of the University Clinic in Frankfurt am Main, central Germany on October 3,
2014 ©Boris Roessler (DPA/AFP)
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The drug was invented at Vienna
General Hospital and is made by a small Austrian firm called MChE-F4Pharma. It
had previously been tested on lab mice infected with the dengue virus and was
also put through a trial among 234 European patients to assess its potential
for limiting damage to cardiac tissue after a heart attack.
The combination of intensive care
and the drug helped the Ugandan patient to stabilize and then recover, the
doctors reported.
After a 30-day observation period,
no trace of Ebola was found in his blood, and he was released from hospital to
return to his family.
But the Lancet study also reported
that shortly after this case, another Ebola patient with acute Ebola and
haemorrhage was treated with FX06 at a hospital in the eastern Germany city of
Leipzig, but died.
Treating Ebola cases in intensive
care is a task with "complexity and specific challenges," it warned.
FX06 is "a potentially valuable
therapeutic candidate" for fighting the disease, the authors said, calling
for the drug to be assessed in clinical trials.
More than 6,900 people have died in the latest
Ebola epidemic, which is centred on the west African states of Guinea, Liberia
and Sierra Leone, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday.
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