Quest for an Ebola Cure Intensifies as Doctors Struggle to Treat Patients
Original article from: Wired posted on August 7, 2014. By Carolyn Crist
John Connor would really like to cure Ebola. He’s a microbiologist at Boston University, working in an interdisciplinary unit with BU computer scientists and engineers, Boston-area biotech companies, and researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston to answer a bunch of questions—how to speed up diagnosis, what the best target is inside the virus, how to develop a vaccine. So Connor’s team, for example, is looking at the RNA that Ebola uses to make copies of itself in the body. Based on isolating that, they hope to create a vaccine that could target not only the five different known types of Ebola, but also the related Marburg virus as well. But first they have to identify the right chunk of RNA.