Two Ebola Drugs Get Tested On Patients

Patients afflicted with the Ebola virus have received drugs from Chimerix and Fujifilm. Chimerix’s experimental drug brincidofovir was administered last week to Thomas Eric Duncan, a patient at a Dallas hospital who later died. An oral nucleotide analog, the compound may be effective against all five families of double-stranded-DNA-containing viruses that affect humans, the company says. Meanwhile, Fujifilm’s Avigan, approved in Japan as a flu treatment, may have helped cure a nurse who was being treated for ­Ebola and later was released from a French hospital. Fujifilm notes that a German hospital also requested the drug to treat an Ebola patient.