Recently, two Ebola survivors from Nigeria flew to Vanderbilt, not only to share their story of survival, but to provide blood samples for ongoing research in the Vanderbilt Medical Center. Researchers at Vanderbilt are developing antibodies that could help treat people infected with Ebola and protect people at high risk of infection.
“There is a very small list of people in the United States who have survived Ebola,” said Dr. James Crowe, director of Vanderbilt Vaccine Center. “We’ve studied almost all of them, yet we needed more samples. We had specific contact with these individuals in Nigeria … and they volunteered to visit and to tell us their story and to give a blood sample here.”
Crowe began his Ebola research in 2013, about a year before the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. He received a grant from the Department of Defense to study Marburg and Ebola, two diseases on a list called Agents of Bioterrorism and Emerging Infectious Diseases, produced by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Both diseases are in category A, which contains the worst diseases on this list.
“It’s been virtually impossible to get blood out of Africa, despite over 10,000 people who got infected. When we first started working on this, we obtained over a thousand vials of blood cells from Ebola survivors from a 2007 outbreak,” Crowe said.
The 2007 outbreak from which Crowe obtained vials occurred in Uganda, and existing HIV research infrastructure made it possible for them to obtain cells, though the process of getting them into the United States was complicated. A host of people including the US Army (who had people conducting HIV research), the Center for of Disease and Control, the University of McCrary, a Ugandan university helping with the research and the Ugandan Health Minister had to approve the blood.
The research in Crowe’s lab focuses on isolating antibodies from blood samples of people who have survived infectious diseases.
“We can make antibodies to almost anything, anything that people have experienced,” Crowe said.
The lab then manufactures antibodies, which would attach to a virus and prevent it from infecting other cells. This antibody research is not just limited to severe and rarer diseases like Ebola. It also targets viruses like Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), which is the most common cause of children being hospitalized in the United States.
“Antibodies themselves, if we give them to people, are only temporary,” Crowe said. “They only probably are present in the body after you get them for about three weeks, so you would have to get a second dose. They are either temporary prevention for a few weeks, or they can be used for therapy either way. So we make them, and then we figure out how to use them.”
For health care workers looking to go to Africa, a few weeks of protection provided by these antibodies could be incredibly useful. Additionally, researchers are working on developing treatments for Ebola. ZMapp, which uses re-engineered mouse antibodies, had been used in the 2014 Ebola outbreak on some patients.Though it was suggested to be helpful, it has not been clinically proven. The Vanderbilt labs hope to produce a second-generation, safer antibody drug using human antibodies to replace ZMapp.
In order to do the large scale testing needed for a dangerous disease like Ebola, Vanderbilt is an integral part of a national network of hospitals working on Ebola treatments. This network includes a biosafety level 4 lab at University of Texas Galveston, which holds the live Ebola viruses where Vanderbilt tests antibodies, and Scripps in California which has equipment that can do more detailed structural scans.
“We are one of the world’s few antibody labs that can make human antibodies,” Crowe said.
With the arrival of new blood from the Nigerian Ebola patients, as well as additional blood coming from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Crowe’s lab will continue the long detailed process of developing antibodies for potential treatments and protective measures against Ebola.
