The Scientists, the Ebola fighters in their own words
Dr. Pardis Sabeti, 38
Geneticist who sequenced the Ebola genome from the outbreak
I think I first encountered Ebola from the movie Outbreak. Then there was the book The Hot Zone. It’s the type of thing you either read and say, “Oh wow, that’s terrifying,” or you read it and say, “Oh wow, I want to do that.” I read it and said, “Oh wow, I want do that.” With my colleagues in Africa and at the Broad Institute [of MIT and Harvard], we had for a long time considered the possibility that there could be Ebola circulating in West Africa.One of the many reasons we thought that could be the case was that often we see Ebola cases centered where there are a lot of chimp populations. One of the only places where there were chimps that didn’t have Ebola at that point was West Africa.
We considered the possibility that the virus could have been circulating undetected in populations for many years, misdiagnosed as other diseases that look similar, like malaria or typhoid fever.
We, like everybody else in the field, follow Ebola news closely. We all have alerts on various systems for anything that comes up on these viruses, and we saw the alert on cases in Guinea, declaring the outbreak in Guinea in March. Everybody agreed we needed to move.
We had [set up research collaborations with] the Kenema Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. The outbreak was on the border of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. When it was recognized there were cases in Guinea, we knew it was possible the hospital would see cases. Our colleagues there and at the Ministry of Health in Sierra Leone said, “We need to do surveillance and diagnosis,” and we said, "Absolutely. We’ll help."
The genome sequencing that we do is so critical to the development of diagnostics, treatments and vaccines. The diagnostic that is needed to even confirm Ebola is only possible because we know the genome sequence of the virus. The process of diagnosis comes first for patients, but in the arc of knowledge, you need the sequencing to develop the diagnostic, and you need to do this continuously, because viruses change over time. Essentially what we are doing is reading out the virus’ genome to find out what is the organism at play, what we are dealing with at any point in time.
Therapies—like the monoclonal antibodies used like ZMapp—are based on attacking the protein sequences of the virus. If the genome changes, the proteins change and the antibodies may no longer work. It’s the same for the vaccine—if the proteins change, the vaccine may not work. So the genome sequence is the fundamental first piece—what defines the agent that is circulating, how we detect it, how we treat it and how we prevent it from spreading.
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