Health officials in Democratic Republic of Congo are planning to launch a clinical trial of four Ebola treatments, STAT reports. The experimental drugs include an antiviral medicine and three monoclonal antibodies.
Rather than have a control arm, the trial will compare the efficacy of the four experimental treatments against each other, at least in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Other countries that participate in the trial may choose to include a current treatment as a control arm. The drugs include the antiviral Remdesivir, and the antibodies ZMapp, REGN 3470-3471-3479, and mAB 114, which is being developed by DRC’s National Institute of Biomedical Research and the US National Institutes of Health.
The study will likely run over the course of several outbreaks in multiple countries, and it will probably begin this month, Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust who is the co-chair ...