Against the clock towards new Ebola virus therapies

Since the end of 2013, West Africa has been suffering the largest Ebola virus (EBOV) outbreak in recorded history. The lack of health care infrastructure in the affected countries, as well as a concentration of infected cases in the most populated areas allowed the virus to spread with no control during the first months of the outbreak. With no specific treatment available to combat EBOV infection and its associated disease, an extraordinary worldwide effort was made to confront the severity of the situation and to establish new therapeutic strategies that would lead to better and faster control and eradicate the outbreak. In the last two years, several candidate therapies and potential vaccines against EBOV have arisen and human clinical trials are ongoing, in hopes of starting their deployment in the affected countries. This article reviews the current candidate therapies against EBOV, their stage of development and future prospects in battling EBOV outbreaks. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.