The World Health Organization announced on Thursday the start of clinical trials on two potential treatments for the Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with the first patient enrolled in the study.
The study also aims to evaluate the effectiveness of combining the two treatments against the Bdende strain, for which no approved vaccine or treatment currently exists.
Congo experienced an outbreak of this strain in May, with more than 1,400 confirmed cases and 400 deaths recorded by the end of June.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that providing safe and effective treatments would help save more lives, while researcher Amanda Rojek, who is leading the study and is a professor at the Institute of Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, stressed the importance of conducting research in parallel with the response to the outbreak.
For his part, Congolese Health Minister Roger Kamba expressed hope that the study's findings would help save lives during the current outbreak and strengthen preparedness for future epidemics.