The Scientist - Bioterrorist battles

A Swiss-based firm may have a back-door way to thwart a bioterrorist attack—by fighting the flu.

Even if all the human-flu and animal-Ebola results are great, there is still the lingering question about the basic tenet of Evolva’s approach: whether those results will translate into a preventive for Ebola in humans.

“Animals have a very different set of susceptibilities to different infections,” points out Jonathan Kimmelman, an associate professor of biomedical ethics at McGill University in Montreal. “All the time, drugs work miracles in animals, and they flunk their test in humans.”