A team of scientists, including one of Indian-origin, has found potential drug candidates that successfully treated up to 90 percent of mice exposed to the Ebola virus.Since December 2013, the Ebola virus has infected more than 25,000 people and taken the lives of more than 10,000.But the US Food and Drug Administration has yet to approve any therapeutic drugs or vaccines against it, said researcher Rekha Panchal from the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and colleagues.The researchers studied a class of small molecules called diazachrysenes, which they have found in lab tests to be non-toxic and effective against the most potent bacterial toxin, botulinum neurotoxin.
They wanted to screen this family of compounds for possible anti-Ebola drug candidates.The researchers narrowed down their search to a handful of diazachrysenes.In their study, 70 to 90 percent of the mice that received one of three of the experimental compounds survived infection and did not show any obvious side effects.They findings appeared in the journal ACS Infectious Diseases.