[opensourcepharma] a open source cure for Ebola?

Tue Aug 12 16:07:40 UTC 2014

You all may have seen this already, but in case not:

FACTBOX-Developers of potential Ebola vaccines and treatments
11 August 2014 14:28 EDT
Aug 11 (Reuters) - Several companies with potential Ebola vaccines and treatments have captured the spotlight, as developers face mounting pressure to expedite research on new medical interventions.
The Ebola epidemic in West Africa has killed nearly 1,000 people and prompted the World Health Organization to declare an international health emergency.
No Ebola drugs or vaccines have entered mid-stage human trials, let alone been approved. The most advanced have been tested only in monkeys and a handful of humans.
VACCINES
GLAXOSMITHKLINE PLC
GSK is co-developing a vaccine with the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which has shown promising results in primates.
The vaccine is due to enter early-stage human trials, pending U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval. GSK has said human testing should start this year. NIAID expects trials to begin "as early as fall 2014."
Even if it is fast-tracked and works as well as hoped, the new vaccine could not be ready for widespread deployment before 2015.
JOHNSON & JOHNSON
The company's Crucell unit is working with the U.S. NIAID to develop a vaccine, which should enter early-stage clinical testing in late-2015 or early-2016. The Crucell vaccine is designed to give additional protection against Marburg, another severe and highly fatal disease caused by a virus from the same family as Ebola.
BAVARIAN NORDIC A/S
The Danish company is developing its smallpox vaccine, Imvanex, for use as an anti-filovirus injection. The drug was found to be 100 percent protective against Ebola and Marburg in non-human primates.
The U.S. government awarded the company a $17.9 million contract in 2012. The injectable form of Imvanex is likely to enter Phase I clinical trials in the United States in 2015, Maxim analyst Jason Kolbert said.
PROFECTUS BIOSCIENCES INC
The privately owned company has tested its vaccine in monkeys, with good results. A single intramuscular injection was found to protect all of the rhesus monkeys exposed to Ebola three weeks later. The company hopes to launch a human trial within 12 months.
TREATMENTS
TEKMIRA PHARMACEUTICALS CORP
The FDA has allowed the Canadian drugmaker to resume testing a drug in people infected with Ebola, after blocking human tests last month. The FDA had halted the early-stage study following safety concerns among people taking the highest doses of the drug.
BIOCRYST PHARMACEUTICALS INC
The company's BCX4430 drug is in pre-clinical trials to treat Marburg, and analysts believe it could potentially cure Ebola.
SIGA TECHNOLOGIES INC
The bio-defense drug developer's experimental drug, ST-383, aims to prevent the Ebola virus from entering host cells, effectively ending its replication cycle, Kolbert said in a note. The company says the drug is being tested on animals.
MEDIVECTOR
The privately held drugmaker, along with its Japanese partner, Fujifilm Holdings Corp, is in talks with the FDA to submit an application to expand the use of its influenza drug, Favipiravir, as a treatment for Ebola.
SAREPTA THERAPEUTICS INC
Sarepta has undertaken some human trials on its anti-Ebola drug, but lost government funding two years ago.
MAPP BIOPHARMACEUTICAL INC
The California-based privately owned company shot into the limelight when its anti-Ebola drug was given to two Ebola-infected U.S. aid workers, who have since shown signs of improvement. However, so far it has only been tested in monkeys. Mapp was part of a consortium of 15 research outfits that in March won a five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health worth up to $28 million to find a treatment for Ebola.
NANOVIRICIDES INC
The company said last week it would resume development of its anti-Ebola drug. (Reporting by Natalie Grover in Bangalore)

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From: opensourcepharma [mailto:opensourcepharma-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of zakir thomas
Sent: Tuesday, August 12, 2014 1:48 AM
To: Tomasz Sablinski
Cc: opensourcepharma at lists.okfn.org
Subject: Re: [opensourcepharma] a open source cure for Ebola?

There is this broad US patent ( http://www.google.com/patents/US20120251502 )covering ebola virus:
Reproducing Claim 1 and 2 below:
Zakir

Claims
1. An isolated hEbola virus comprising a nucleic acid molecule comprising a nucleotide sequence of:
a) a nucleotide sequence set forth in SEQ ID NOS: 1 or 10;
b) a nucleotide sequence hybridizing under stringent conditions to SEQ ID NOS: 1 or 10; or
c) a nucleotide sequence of at least 70%-99% identity to the SEQ ID NOS: 1 or 10, with the proviso that said nucleotide sequence is not SEQ ID NO: 20.
2. An isolated hEbola virus having Centers for Disease Control Deposit Accession No. 200706291.
3. The hEbola virus of claim 1 which is killed.
4. The hEbola virus of claim 1 which is an attenuated hEbola virus.
5. The virus of claim 4 wherein at least one property of the attenuated hEbola virus is reduced from among infectivity, replication ability, protein synthesis ability, assembling ability or cytopathic effect.

On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 5:57 PM, Tomasz Sablinski <tomasz at transparencyls.com<mailto:tomasz at transparencyls.com>> wrote:
A good idea. I think we would have bigger impact if this letter is structured as a request for support (financial, etc) of a concrete action that Open Source Pharma is ready to take:
1/ coordinate the crowd sourced selection of suitable compound(s)
2/ design a clinical study protocol for testing of the above
I am putting together a draft proposal for Open Source Pharma to consider Transparency Life Sciences for the execution of these crowdsourcing efforts; I should have something out to all of you to review in the next day or two.

Regards,
Tomasz

On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 7:41 AM, Els Torreele <els.torreele at opensocietyfoundations.org<mailto:els.torreele at opensocietyfoundations.org>> wrote:
So Ebola was just declared a public health emergency by WHO.

Considering the call by Jeremy Farrar (Welcome Trust), Peter Piot (London School) and David Heymann (ex-WHO, now UK Health Protection Agency) to test experimental treatments now (and not only on Americans) and to do so with public money and leadership (not waiting for companies to develop their own drugs the normal and slow way),
(see http://online.wsj.com/articles/experimental-medicine-and-african-ebola-1407258551),
could we write an open letter to Farrar, Piot and Heymann and proposing/demanding that this be done in an open source approach, sharing all data, crowdsourcing for more data and ideas, and possibly get more and more researchers on it?
The Welcome Trust and London School are likely supportive of an open approach, and Farrar and co. could possibly be approached beforehand to seek their support.

I'm not a good writer, but I'm sure one or several of you could develop such a letter quickly, and then we can get it out early next week, before WHO convenes that medical ethics expert committee to discuss the ethics of the accelerated clinical research (in which data sharing could be an important element)

What do people think?

________________________________
From: opensourcepharma [opensourcepharma-bounces at lists.okfn.org<mailto:opensourcepharma-bounces at lists.okfn.org>] on behalf of Matthew Todd [mattoddchem at gmail.com<mailto:mattoddchem at gmail.com>]
Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2014 6:03 PM
To: opensourcepharma at lists.okfn.org<mailto:opensourcepharma at lists.okfn.org>
Subject: Re: [opensourcepharma] a open source cure for Ebola?
I had an interesting day today giving a talk at Boston University. They have a former NIH-supported compound collection (http://cmld.bu.edu/science/compoundlibraries/). If a suitable bio lab could be found for an Ebola screen, they would be interested in contributing their whole collection to a screening effort in the short term, open source. This is great.
The compounds are not a repurposing library, but have interesting and diverse chemotypes. I wonder if we can use this pledge to obtain contributions from other labs, but before I start asking, I guess we need to know (John M) whether there are the facilities to handle such a screen anywhere? We're starting to talk thousands of compounds.
Gordon Conference: That's great news, John. I was just looking at their rules yesterday. They don't do "policy" conferences, but the easy thing to do there is to ensure the talks are on science, but to qualify they need to be run open source, at least to some extent. It'd be really interesting to pull that program together. Let me know (offline if you prefer) if I can help.
Best,
M

On 7 August 2014 09:57, McKew, John (NIH/NCATS) [E] <john.mckew at nih.gov<mailto:john.mckew at nih.gov>> wrote:
Just getting caught here as I was away at a Gordon conference this week.  I like the idea of crowd sourcing information using a Wiki format.  I can contact NIAID and see what resources they are deploying or gathered.  I will have to read through The papers Bernard has cited to see what was screened to find these compounds. I would guess nobody has screened a repurposing collection as large as the one we have so that might be worth doing.  The catch is this must be BSL4 level of containment and our facility can only go to BSL 2. NIAID has a faculty for BSL3 and. 4 screening so that would be an option.  When I get back to the office I will look into how interested people are in this.  When people were coming down with CM after IT injection of steroids contaminated with fungus we were able to complete a screen and release data in a publication in about 3 months from outbreak.  In that case we did not find anything new.

On another note I introduced the concept of a Gordon Med Chem session on Open Source  Drug Discovery and Development at the planning session last night.  At first the idea was met with complete silence but after I sold it to the group I was able to gain enough enthusiasm to get this accepted into the next stage of decision making.  I will let everyone what I hear next.  As Matt mentioned at Bellagio this is primarily a very conservative group of med chemists so this was a nice surprise.
John

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