Via Science, a report by Jon Cohen and Martin Enserink: Special report: Ebola's thin harvest. Excerpt:
Since 29 November, not a single new Ebola case has been reported in Guinea, Sierra Leone, or Liberia. If no new cases pop up, the world will be able to declare on 14 January that the 2-year Ebola epidemic has ended at last, after more than 28,600 cases and 11,300 deaths.
Victory would also mean the end of an unprecedented era in Ebola research. The tragedy offered a unique opportunity: Never before had the disease affected enough people to allow researchers to test Ebola drugs and vaccines in a real-world setting. As the number of cases exploded in mid-2014, they set in motion a vast research program that operated at breakneck speed.
But the harvest of that massive effort is thin.
The biggest success so far is a vaccine produced by Merck. A 31 July report in The Lancet documented remarkable effectiveness in a real-world trial in Guinea. But all other results have yet to appear in the scientific literature. And a careful examination of the data so far—supported by dozens of interviews with the leaders of the studies and other Ebola experts—makes it clear that almost every other trial seems destined to end in questionable results or outright failure. Findings from those that have ended are proving difficult to publish in top-tier journals.
The reasons are varied and complicated. Even under the best circumstances, clinical trials don’t always deliver satisfying results. In this case, many studies started too late, when the epidemic was already declining, and ran out of patients. Others had designs that from the outset had little chance of providing a clear answer. A pharmaceutical company aborted a trial for reasons it never clarified, and the fate of another trial remains obscure even to the World Health Organization.
