An experimental drug being developed by Canadian-based pharmaceutical company, Tekmira, may never reach Ebola patients in West Africa.

There are several companies working on new treatments for the Ebola outbreak, but none of the medications are likely to be available anytime soon. A few factors will limit the potential for these drugs to reach the areas hardest hit by the outbreak this year.

Of its own drug, Tekmira Chief Executive Officer Mark Murray said, “The regulatory framework to support its use in Africa has not yet been established.” He followed up by saying there was no guarantee that such a framework could be established.

Even with the World Health Organization (WHO) announcing this week that the use of experimental therapies on certain cases of Ebola was ethically sound, pharmaceutical companies tend to be leary of distributing unsupported therapies. These treatments will not have been tested thoroughly, so the potential risks associated with its use would not be known. There will not be the scientific data that most companies rely on to support the safety of their products.

The treatment being developed by Tekmira is still in early clinical stages. Testing on this drug had been halted already due to safety concerns, but the testing pool was with healthy volunteers. Now the testing is being approved for patients with the Ebola virus, as safety concerns do not outweigh the potential benefits for those already infected.

Renewed testing is not the only obstacle that drug companies face while trying to distribute the drug to patients. The supply of drugs in the testing phase is often very limited. Only enough to support a clinical trial is made and the production process has not been streamlined. To make more would involve intense lab-based manufacturing processes that could take months. Depending on the stage of testing the medication was in, Tekmira would have at most a few hundred doses of the medication at hand.

The WHO has estimated that close to 2,000 cases of Ebola have been reported with over 1,000 lives claimed.