In an amazing new discovery published in several journal articles this week, a biochemical route used by the deadly Ebola virus to infect human cells has been identified. This may lead to the invention of innovative new medications that can prevent or treat one of the world’s most lethal viral diseases.

To better understand the biology of Ebola, a team of researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, the Whitehead Institute at MIT and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases studied how the virus actually infects cells.

The virus interferes with the endothelial cells lining the interior surface of blood vessels and with coagulation. As the blood vessel walls become damaged and destroyed, the platelets are unable to coagulate, and patients succumb to hypovolemic shock. Ebola is transmitted through bodily fluids, while conjunctiva exposure may also lead to transmission.

Here is the science behind the potential solution…

Researchers looked at normal cell proteins that the Ebola virus might be hijacking, in effect, to get inside and infect mammalian cells. Investigators focused on one protein in particular – called Neimann-Pick C1 or NPC1.

The Neimann-Pick protein, which is embedded naturally in cell membranes, helps transport cholesterol throughout cells. People who are born with a rare genetic defect and don’t make the protein eventually die of Neimann-Pick disease, in which fatty substances called lipids collect and clog various internal organs.

The disease is known to progress over time. In new attempts to prevent or treat an Ebola infection however, it now seems possible to design a small molecule that interferes with production of the Neimann-Pick protein in cells temporarily too briefly to cause problems with elevated cholesterol.

The Ebola hemorrhagic virus causes very high fever, both internal and external bleeding, and has led to thousands of deaths in many sub-Saharan African countries, including Gabon, Sudan, the Ivory Coast and Uganda, since the first reported outbreak 35 years ago.

Kartik Chandran, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Albert Einstein comments:

“The critical step that we were studying is what we call viral entry, and it’s basically the step that results in the virus getting into the cytoplasm where the [genetic] goodies are for making copies of itself.”

Chandran says that in experiments with both human cells and in mice, the Ebola virus was unable to gain a toehold in cells that were missing the NPC1 protein:

“You couldn’t infect the cells with Ebola. And there are also mice that, like the human[s], don’t have the protein and develop Neimann-Pick disease. You know the [Ebola] virus, it’s like ‘shock and awe.’ It’s like over within a week. I mean the virus grows very quickly and it kills off the very cells you need to mount your immune response. If we could stop that from happening or slow it down enough, we might give the person a chance.”

In even new groundbreaking news, scientists have developed a candidate drug that could be used to treat or prevent an Ebola outbreak. Another hemorrhagic virus called Marburg uses a similar mechanism to infect cells and should also respond to a drug that blocks the Neimann-Pick protein.

Written by Sy Kraft