Dr. Christian Happi

Thank you.

The Bundibujo virus or strain of Ebola is different from the Zaire strain simply because it has diverged.

It has evolved.

It has followed a different evolutionary path.

And for that reason, the virus is quite divergent.

from those that you strain.

And that divergence actually creates its own challenge because diagnostics, vaccines, and drugs are often very strain-specific because they are targeting some very specific epitopes in any virus.

And because the bunjibujo

virus has not been studied extensively.

That is a reason why now we want to use this outbreak in order to not only sequence the virus, but actually leverage the data that will be coming from the outbreak to develop the necessary countermeasures.

And these countermeasures are drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics.

Not really.

I think, you know, when we had our last outbreak, when the Bujumbuja outbreak, I mean, occurred, I think that was probably 2007.

There were, I mean, at that time, genomic sequencing was not really at the state where it is now.

It was a technology that was in infancy.

And at that time, we didn't have the capability to actually to generate the data through genome sequencing.

And between 2007 and now, a lot has changed.

And they will really want to take advantage of it now to study this virus in a way that wasn't done before in order to develop the countermeasures as I mentioned before.

Simply because there is, you know, the global health community in general and then the governments in Africa in particular have not really invested in

If we had intentionally invested in doing, you know, to do viral disease surveillance or to do pathogen genomic surveillance, we could have probably come across, you know, the viral sequence state.