New Drug Targets May Lead to Effective Ebola Treatments

There are no approved treatments or preventives against Ebola virus disease, but investigators have now designed peptides that mimic the virus' N-trimer, a highly conserved region of a protein that's used to gain entry inside cells.

The team showed that the peptides can be used as targets to help researchers develop drugs that might block Ebola virus from entering into cells.

"In contrast to the most promising current approaches for Ebola treatment or prevention, which are species-specific, our 'universal' target will enable the selection of broad-spectrum inhibitors that should block all known--and likely future--Ebola strains," says Dr. Michael Kay, senior author of the Protein Science study.

Source: Wiley