In Brief:
When a German scientist accidentally pricked herself with a needle containing the Ebola-Zaire virus last year, scientists around the world tried to determine what the best course of action would be. The lead author of the new study, virologist Thomas Geisbert of the Boston University School of Medicine, who has been working on Ebola for more than 20 years, says that drug development has been slow and difficult. For the new study, Geisbert and his colleagues used snippets of so-called small interfering RNAs (siRNA), which can tinker with a virus's replication. Nonetheless, the study is an important proof of concept, says Heinz Feldmann, an Ebola researcher at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases's Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana. It's important that Geisbert's and other compounds now get tested and developed further, Feldmann says, so that the treatment is on the shelves the next time a researcher or health worker pricks him or herself.
