NanoViricides Evaluates NV-387 for Ebola Virus Treatment

The company said, "NanoViricides compares potential treatment options for Ebola Bundibugyo virus strain and finds that the Company's broad-spectrum antiviral drug candidate NV-387 is worthy of evaluation in this scenario. The rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola virus causing the current outbreak appears to be its new variant, likely freshly introduced from some animal source, such as fruit bats. The outbreak which was declared a public health emergency of international concern by the WHO on May 16, 2026, is rapidly expanding, outpacing containment efforts, with over 900 suspected cases and over 220 deaths, in a high traffic region bordering the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and South Sudan and with 11 more nations in Africa at risk. There are no approved vaccines or treatments against the Bundibugyo virus. As such, the possible treatment options during the current expanding outbreak scenario must look at either other approved therapies that may not work, or look at new therapies that are at clinical stage. There were four drug candidates tested in a clinical trial in an Ebola Zaire outbreak, namely an antibody cocktail called ZMapp, another antibody cocktail called REGN-EB3, a monoclonal antibody developed from a survivor patient called mAb114, and a broad-spectrum nucleotide analog drug called Remdesivir. Of these, the more effective mAb114 and REGN-EB3 were approved as treatments for Ebola Zaire infection, and the effect of ZMapp and Remdesivir against standard of care was not evaluated in the PALM clinical trial. All of these four drugs require infusions, which is very difficult in a deadly disease such as Ebola that requires strong patient isolation protocols, and wherein protection of health care workers is of utmost important. Further, monoclonal antibodies are highly specific to the strain of virus and usually are not effective against unrelated strains. Recently, a drug candidate, obeldesivir, was developed related to remdesivir. Oral obeldesivir failed as a treatment for COVID-19 in a Phase III clinical trial. This clinical failure raises substantial doubts that obeldesivir would be of any benefit in Ebola Bundibugyo infection, since the clinical activity of obeldesivir indeed appears to be less than that of remdesivir, Remdesivir was approved for COVID-19, but not for Ebola Zaire. NV-387 was previously evaluated by the Company in animal models wherein a separate group of infected animals was treated with remdesivir to serve as a positive control. The increase in survival over untreated animals was 8.5 days for NV-387 IV, 4.4 days for NV-387 Oral, but only 2 days for Remdesivir IV in this uniformly lethal infection model for COVID-19. This indicates that NV-387 IV as well as NV-387 PO were substantially superior to Remdesivir. We believe these results of NV-387 being superior to Remdesivir as a treatment would hold for other viruses as well, including Ebola viruses."