Partnership pays off during new Ebola outbreak

A partnership between UNMC and the Institut Pasteur de Dakar, Senegal, created in the aftermath of an Ebola outbreak in 2013-16 and funded by the Department of Defense through a task order awarded to the National Strategic Research Institute (NSRI), helped to quickly identify the strain of a new Ebola outbreak in Guinea this year.
Working in collaboration with the Senegalese scientists and Ministry of Health Guinea, Mike Wiley, PhD, and Catherine Pratt of the UNMC College of Public Health, helped identify the strain of the new Guinea outbreak in February as similar to the 2013-16 Ebola outbreak.
The quick identification is the product of years of collaboration.
“When I was at the U.S. Army Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, I was a part of a team that was able to respond to the West African Ebola outbreak in Liberia and deployed sequencing equipment. We were able to partner with the Liberia Institute of Biomedical Research and work with local scientists to produce genomic data,” Dr. Wiley said.
“Using that same model we partnered with the Institut Pasteur de Dakar, and in 2017 deployed sequencing equipment and provided training to the local scientists.”
The collaboration in Senegal and other African countries (Pratt has spent several months in the Democratic Republic of Congo over the last three years) has been ongoing, with annual trips to do refresher training, including helping scientists with genomic sequence during three separate Ebola virus disease outbreaks and a monkey pox outbreak.
“The ultimate goal is to have rapid pathogen characterization so that we know that we have the right therapeutics and assays in place, and this all happens much faster when partnering with local scientists in the affected country compared to having the physical samples come back to the U.S. or Europe,” Dr. Wiley said.
In this most recent case involving samples from the new Guinean Ebola virus outbreak, a shipping delay nearly derailed the process.
“We originally tried to send reagents to our partners in Senegal, through UNMC and our NSRI task order,” Dr. Wiley said. “The package was lost — it was a fluky thing, but you always need a backup plan.”
Using his small business, PraesensBio, operating out of the Nebraska Innovation Campus BioTech Connector based in Lincoln, Nebraska, Dr. Wiley sent a research scientist to hand-carry the required sequencing reagents and a prototype of a target-enrichment assay out to Senegal. The researcher worked with the scientists there to generate genomes from two out of the three samples they had received from the Guinea outbreak.
The results of the genomic sequencing — which, Dr. Wiley said, suggest the source of the new outbreak may be from a persistent infection — have drawn international attention.
But also of note is the success of the collaboration. The speedy identification of the genomic sequencing allows for positive public health impacts.
“Having the genomic data right there off the bat tells you that we already have the diagnostic assays we need, because it’s not different enough from what we’ve seen before,” Dr. Wiley said. “The therapeutics that we have, if they worked on the 2013-16 variant, then they are probably going to work in this outbreak. The same goes for the vaccine. That information provides immediate actionable information to the people on the ground.
“Having the information quickly will help in directing the investigation toward looking for a potential persistently infected source instead of, for example, only looking for connections to an animal reservoir.”
Dr. Wiley described the work as an example of the success of a public-private-academic collaboration.
“All these partnerships that we’ve been developing over the years really worked together to make this happen,” he said.