How Israel 's Leading Ebola Expert Could Eradicate The Virus.

How Israel 's Leading Ebola Expert Could Eradicate The Virus And Why The US Military Is Investing In Him.(NoCamels).

So what’s really being done about a cure? Dr. Leslie Lobel, an Israeli researcher at Ben Gurion University and one the world’s few experts on the Ebola virus, is currently ahead of many of his international colleagues when it comes to discovering a vaccine that would make humans immune to the virus. But besides toting his own vaccine as the cure all and end all of the Ebola epidemic, Lobel has some interesting insight to impart on why this is the most serious outbreak in history.

According to Dr. Lobel, the present lack of interest in Ebola in medical circles is due to two main factors: big pharmaceutical companies not finding long-term treatments to regional viruses profitable, and the viral infections being overshadowed by more widespread diseases like cancer and diabetes.

As Dr. Lobel tells NoCamels, “What has happened is that therapies have not been developed for infectious diseases for many years. Suddenly there’s an outbreak and people get scared. I think this is more of a wakeup call.”

Despite the fact that the United States has classified Ebola a ‘Category A’ potential bioterror agent, big pharmaceutical companies don’t deem an Ebola drug ‘profitable’, says Lobel, because according to their assessments, the disease affects a specific group of people in mainly impoverished countries with poor medical care. Therefore, these companies do not see profitable returns they would like for an Ebola cure, causing pharma executives to ask, “Who are they going to sell it to?”, as researcher Thomas Geisbert puts it.

The economical concerns of the pharmaceutical companies are what force Dr. Lobel and others to turn to other sources of research funding, like the United States Military. “One of the great Achilles Heels of any military is infectious disease,” explained Dr. Lobel. “I think the American military, in particular, is heavily invested in developing defenses against biological pathogens, both from nature and from potential bioweapons.” 

Lobel, Israel’s preeminent Ebola researcher, immigrated to the country in 2002 from the US, making it easier for him to gain the confidence of one of world’s only militaries (besides Canada) investing in an Ebola cure.

Currently, doctors are using a US Military-grant funded passive Ebola therapy, the “cocktailed antibody method,” tested on monkeys and used to treat the two American aid workers infected with the virus. However, the success of this method is still not proven, but offers the best ‘local’ approach to treating the virus, according to Dr. Lobel.

Meanwhile, Dr. Lobel’s own passive therapy, developed together with his co-principal investigator Dr. Victoria Yavelsky, is the most promising option on the market for a long-term Ebola treatment. Applying human monoclonal antibodies, Dr. Lobel hopes that his vaccine will eventually be used to immunize against the deadly virus, a far-off dream for the Western African countries currently dealing with the epidemic.

To create the vaccine, Dr. Lobel and his research team travel to their partnering lab at the Uganda Virus Research Institute in Entebbe five times a year to take blood samples of healthy Ebola survivors. The patients that Dr. Lobel studies are Ebola survivors who managed to self-generate antibodies that effectively fought off the virus. By visiting with these survivors, who unfortunately are considered pariahs in African society due to their history of infection, Lobel not only seeks to isolate the antibodies in their blood for the development of his vaccine, but to make sure that they retain a sense of social self-importance fostered through his regular vists.

Dr. Lobel believes that his survivor blood-based method will prove most effective in immunizing against the disease, but it will take nearly five years until an early form of the vaccine is ready. 

For now, his method of treatment is still undergoing animal testing, but Lobel believes that there’s still time. According to his estimates, the recent breakout has been over exaggerated by the international press, which is why he provided us with a bit of perspective. Hmmmm.....I can hear the Anti Zionists already "Ebola is a Zionist plot for control of Africa, they had the cure all along." Read the full story here.