Creating a treatment for Ebola--and maybe other diseases
July 8, 2015 5:40 AM   Subscribe

Moses, meanwhile, stepped out into the searing midday heat and stretched her legs. She saw six people sitting on the concrete steps of an office across from her lab. Some had been nurses and researchers at Kenema; a couple were part of a newly formed survivors’ union. That’s how they’d heard about Moses’ mission. All six had been infected with Ebola and survived. Hypothetically, that made them immune to the disease. That’s why Moses had returned—to harness that immunity to try to ensure Ebola never killed anyone again.
posted by sciatrix (3 comments total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
Ebola Survivors May Be the Key to Treatment—For Almost Any Disease

Holy hyperbolic headline, HypeMan!

This is really conflating two ideas: 1) that more specimens from ebola patients means more materials available to research treatments, and 2) current production models for monoclonal antibody are slow and expensive. The problem is that 1 is not a pre-requisite for improving 2, as the article strongly implies. Work on mAbs has been on-going since the 1980s, and people have been mad about mAbs ever since, with repeated references to them as the Next Magic Bullet. Improvements in lab technology have made mAb production more efficient, but the therapies have their own intrinsic limitations and are not cures "for almost any disease."

Essentially, this article hypes a new production model for mAbs, framed as a cure for ebola. But the article itself notes, "Andersen wasn’t the first person to think of this angle, but no one has ever been able to pull it off." So we have a history of failure for a technique for synthesizing compounds which may or may not be effective, which has yet to actually enter into production, and would be years away from any usable data about its effectiveness. Meanwhile, supportive care continues be the most proven and effective practice for reducing ebola mortality. As Kraft et al. (2015) notes:
As underscored in many reports, optimizing clinical supportive care for EVD patients may sustain survival until their native immune systems can clear EBOV viremia, promoting recovery. Improved supportive care may be contributing to the substantially lower mortality in EVD patients managed outside West Africa compared with resource-limited settings.
I'm all for reporting on new lab techniques and the human toll of epidemics, and mAbs are certainly a field of emerging therapies which are both important and interesting. The recent ebola epidemic, however, has led to a bumper harvest of articles breathlessly hyping some next generation, bleeding edge therapy as the solution. If only we could get the right materials and Do Science To Them, we'd all be cured (of almost everything, apparently)!

I want my science reporting to be dry and wonky. All you kids get off my lab bench.
posted by Panjandrum at 8:08 AM on July 8, 2015 [4 favorites]


I think it should be a standard in science journalism that your article has to include at least a bibliography of every paper you hype (and maybe some background), with links to preprints if available.
posted by vogon_poet at 8:28 AM on July 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


Any science writing that is breathless isn't.
posted by Mental Wimp at 9:59 AM on July 8, 2015


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