By: Dylan Sikes - AllPennyStocks.com News

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Months after estimating that the Ebola outbreak in the West African countries of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia could exceed one million patients at the blistering pace it was going, the scare has been dramatically reduced and the worst-ever Ebola outbreak involves far less risk. The latest data from the World Health Organization (updated April 8, 2015) shows there have been 25,516 Ebola cases reported in the three countries, including 10,573 deaths. In light of the extremely high mortality rate, the outbreak certainly created awareness of the need for new drugs to treat Ebola. Notably, Profectus BioSciences, a private company specializing in vaccines made from vesicular stomatitis virus, was featured this week in Nature for its single-dose VesiculoVax vaccine that protected macaques from a lethal dose of the Mokona strain of Ebola that is responsible for the West African outbreak.

Elsewhere, Inovio Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:INO) said on Wednesday that it has been selected to receive a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, to lead a collaborative team in a $45-million program to develop multiple treatment and prevention approaches against Ebola. In the diagnostics space, Cepheid 's (NASDAQ:CPHD) Xpert Ebola Assay was recently granted the Emergency Use Authorization by the FDA to detect the presence of Ebola Zaire Virus in a person’s blood.

Aethlon Medical (OTCQB:AEMD), which we discussed in an article last September for its efforts against the dengue virus, said on Thursday that it has filed a Humanitarian Use Device (HUD) submission to the FDA to support potential market clearance of the Aethlon Hemopurifier as a treatment for Ebola virus. According to the FDA website, an HUD is a device that is intended to benefit patients by treating or diagnosing a disease or condition that affects or is manifested in fewer than 4,000 individuals in the United States per year.

The company’s Hemopurifier is a bio-filtration device designed to remove viruses and shed glycoproteins from blood in a single pass. The potential uses where the Hemopurifier could prove beneficial are expansive, covering a spectrum of indications from virus-related diseases to oncology, especially as the removal of exosomes from the circulatory system relates to treating cancer patients.

“The device targets antiviral drug resistance and could serve as a first-line countermeasure against Ebola and other viruses that are not addressed with proven drug therapies,” Aethlon said in today’s release.

This is important as an HUD and requisite Humanitarian Device Exemption (HDE) for marketing must show the FDA that the benefits of a device outweigh any potential risk and that there are no comparable devices available to diagnose or treat a disease.

Shares of Aethlon have traded as low as 10 cents and as high as 72 cents in the past 52 weeks, hitting the high in November as Ebola stocks were soaring before cooling back down as the threat diminished. In very early trading on Thursday, the stock is up 3.3% at 20.5 cents.

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