The Ebola virus causes a highly infectious and life-threatening disease with mortality rates of up to 90%, which has led to serious outbreaks in various parts of Africa in the past. Due to increasing globalization, growing tourism and the increasing use of natural habitats of intermediate hosts by humans, increasing numbers of infections and cases of infection also in Europe are to be expected in the future.
Approaches to combating the Ebola virus have so far only been approved or effective for the Zaire Ebola virus and are suitable for resource-poor countries only to a limited extent due to special storage conditions and costs. For the Sudan Ebola virus, the second most dangerous Ebola virus species, exist no treatment options.
The working group of Prof. Becker and Dr. Werner has already used structure-based drug design to identify 50 molecules that bind to structurally and functionally highly conserved amino acids of the matrix protein of the virus and therefore have a high chance of being effective against variants of the Ebola virus. In the current exploratory phase, the pre-selection of the most promising candidates and tests for their initial effectiveness against the Ebola virus are being prepared, a synthesis strategy for the optimal chemical modification of the molecules is being developed and cooperation partners for the preclinical phase are being identified.