As the number of Ebola cases declines, pharma company Chimerix is unable to find sufficient patients for its trial in Liberia of the antiviral drug brincidofovir.
As the Ebola epidemic in West Africa appears to be slowing down, one result is that Durham, North Carolina-based Chimerix has found it difficult to fill a trial intended to test the antiviral drug brincidofovir at a clinic in Monrovia, Liberia.The current rate of Ebola is that there has been fewer than 100 new cases per week in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. Chimerix has treated fewer than 10 patients since the study began on January 2, 2015. Due to this low take up, the company says it is canceling the study.Chimerix President and CEO M. Michelle Berrey told The New York Times: “Without having enough patients there to make any conclusions, it wasn’t feasible for us to push forward.”Chimerix is not the only drug company struggling to enroll Ebola patients. Organizers of a Guinean trial to test Fujifilm’s antiviral drug Avigan are looking to include additional clinics in order to find enough patients.Meanwhile, as research on the Ebola virus continues, researchers are seeking for more data. Emma Thomson of the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research told BBC News: “A lot of Ebola sequencing has happened but the data hasn’t always been uploaded. It’s an international emergency so people need to get the data out there to allow it to be analyzed in different ways by different labs.”These thoughts were echoed by Paul Hunter, a professor of health protection at the University of East Anglia, in the same BBC feature. He said: “It would be tragic if, during a crisis like this, data was not being adequately shared with the public health community. The rapid sharing of data could help enable more rapid control of the outbreak.”