Health officials will launch a clinical trial testing if experimental Ebola therapies improve reported Ebola cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Ebola outbreak, according to STAT.
Here are three things to know:
1. For the study, researchers will conduct a randomized controlled trial comparing an antiviral drug and three different antibody treatments to each other with no placebo.
2. Due to the escalating violence in the Congo, the researchers conducting the trial are expected to face complications.
"I don’t think the world quite appreciates the challenge of the environment in which this is happening," said Jeremy Farrar, MD, head of the Wellcome Trust and co-chair of a group that has been working under the auspices of the World Health Organization to draft the trial protocol. "People are being shot at, and it's not just the occasional bit of gunfire.There's mortars, there's kidnappings — it is an intensely fragile environment with a lot of conflict that's been going on for years."
3. The trial is set to begin in the middle of November. As of Nov. 9, there have been 139 patients who received one of the four vaccines. The World Health Organization confirmed 329 probable Ebola causes and 205 deaths.
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