Dec. 5, 2011 On Aug. 26, 1976, a time bomb exploded in Yambuku,
a remote village in Zaire, (now the Democratic Republic of the
Congo). A threadlike virus known as Ebola had emerged, soon
earning a grim distinction as one of the most lethal, naturally
occurring pathogens on earth, killing up to 90 percent of its
victims, and producing a terrifying constellation of symptoms
known as hemorrhagic fever. Now, Charles Arntzen, a researcher
at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, along
with colleagues from ASU, the University of Arizona College of
Medicine-Phoenix, and the United States Army Medical Research
Institute of Infectious Diseases, Fort Detrick, MD, have made
progress toward a vaccine against the deadly virus. The group's
research results appear in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, along with a companion paper by their
collaborators at Mapp Pharmaceuticals in San Diego, CA, led by
Larry Zeitlin. Arntzen's group demonstrated that a plant-derived
vaccine for Ebola provided