Putative Investigational Therapeutics in the Treatment of Patients With Known Ebola Infection

Ebolaviruses (EBOV) are members of the Filoviridae and are known primarily as the underlying cause of severe viral hemorrhagic fevers with disturbingly high case fatality rates. Between 1994 and the present, there have been many EBOV outbreaks affecting mostly central Africa, with 2 large outbreaks in 1995 in Kikwit, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and in Gulu, Uganda in 2000-2001. However, the 2014 West African outbreak significantly exceeds all previous outbreaks in geographic range, number of patients affected, and in disruption of typical activities of civil society. There is strong consensus that the most important element necessary to improve survival from Ebola infection is the provision of full hemodynamic support in the form of aggressive fluid replacement, ability to diagnose and correct severe metabolic derangements, and other standards of modern medical care available in resource-rich environments. However, against this background, a small series of investigational agents or interventions have also been proposed as putative antiviral strategies of potential utility in treating this infection. Unfortunately, phase 1/2 data supporting the safety and efficacy of these agents is generally lacking, and thus there should be equipoise as to which, if any, of these interventions should be utilized in the treatment of severe infection. In this multicenter randomized trial, we propose a flexible trial design with frequent interim monitoring to facilitate early elimination of poorly performing treatments as well as the introduction of new candidate therapies. The trial allows for a series of pairwise comparisons of novel interventions against a background of optimized medical care, with the goal of determining whether one or more of these interventions can improve the mortality over that achievable through optimized standard-of- care (oSOC) alone. The primary endpoint of this trial will be comparative mortality at Day 28, with a number of secondary endpoints that hopefully will generate generalizable knowledge about the relative safety and antiviral activity of these adjunctive interventions.