Jean-Jacques Muyembe: Curbing the Spread of Ebola

A co-discoverer of the Ebola virus and director of the pioneering National Institute of Biomedical Research in Kinshasa, this Congolese virologist has dedicated his life to the fight against epidemics. Following his discovery, his work led to the development of the very first treatment for the Zaire Ebola virus.

“Jean-Jacques Muyembe’s work is, above all, a long-term endeavor at a time when no one was paying attention to this virus, which was initially responsible only for limited outbreaks within the tropical rainforest,” says Eric Delaporte, professor of infectious diseases at the University Hospital and the University of Montpellier and director of TransVIHMI. For more than 20 years now, this joint international unit affiliated with the University of Montpellier (UM), the French National Research Institute for Agricultural Research (IRD), and the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) has been collaborating with the National Institute for Biomedical Research in Kinshasa, led by Professor Muyembe.

On this December 9, the two scientists are not shaking hands warmly on African soil, but beneath the stucco moldings of the Montpellier Faculty of Medicine, where Philippe Augé, president of the university, has come to confer the title of Doctor Honoris Causa upon Jean-Jacques Muyembe. In the anatomy lecture hall where the ceremony is taking place, a small crowd has already gathered to hear the lecture traditionally given by the honoree. Today’s topic: “From the Discovery of the Ebola Virus to Its Control.”

Discovery of a new virus

It’s hard to smile, let alone laugh, when discussing a disease as deadly as Ebola. And yet, with a sense of humor and a simplicity that could be described as extraordinary—given the sheer magnitude of the man’s career—the Congolese professor recounts the grim saga of this virus, which he co-discovered more than 40 years ago. The story begins in September 1976 in a country then still known as Zaire. Jean-Jacques Muyembe, a graduate ofLovanium University (DRC) in 1969 andthe University of Leuven in 1973, was sent on a mission to the small village of Yambuku to investigate a mysterious illness affecting the villagers. “Even the Belgian nuns at the Catholic mission hospital were affected,” the doctor notes. “Neither antimalarial drugs nor antibiotics had any effect on these patients, most of whom died.”

While the authorities suspected thyroid fever, the doctor took blood samples from the patients.“My fingers were often stained with blood; fortunately, I had the reflex to wash my hands immediately with soap—otherwise, I wouldn’t be here with you today. ” When three nurses and two nuns evacuated to Kinshasa also died, Jean-Jacques Muyembe decided to send his samples tothe Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp. There, Professor Peter Piot confirmed the emergence of a new virus. It would be named Ebola, after the river that flows near the village where it first appeared.

Initial control measures

In 1976, the two strains of the virus—Ebola Zaire and Ebola Sudan, which broke out in June in the country from which it takes its name—claimed 318 victims, 280 of whom died, representing a case fatality rate of 88%. As these first Ebola epidemics subsided, AIDS continued to gain momentum in Africa. To combat this new scourge and work on emerging diseases, Jean-Jacques Muyembe—who is also a professor of microbiology at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Kinshasa—dreamed of establishing a research institute modeled after the Pasteur Institute. This dream became a reality in 1984 with the creation of the National Institute for Biomedical Research of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, inaugurated at the time by François Mitterrand and DRC Prime Minister Leon Kengo.“The Congolese were able to develop this center into a true benchmark. Today there are more centers of this scale in Africa, but the INRB was a pioneer as an autonomous national center of international standing,” recalls Eric Delaporte,who at the time was also working on HIV, but in Gabon.

After 19 years of silence, Ebola resurfaced in April 1995 in Kikwit, a city of 400,000 people located 500 km south of Kinshasa. Jean-Jacques Muyembe was then appointed national coordinator of the response to the epidemic. He developed a more precise virological profile of Ebola and highlighted the epidemiological aspects of the disease, particularly the amplifying role of hospitals and funeral rites. He became a pioneer in implementing epidemic control measures such as the“Ebola handshake,”which would inspire Western public health policies 25 years later during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. He also attempted the first serotherapy by treating eight patients with blood from Ebola survivors: seven survived. The epidemic subsided after infecting 317 people and causing the deaths of 250 of them.

On the Trail of AIDS

In the late 1990s, Jean-Jacques Muyembe took over as director of the INRB and continued the efforts to build its international reputation. Meanwhile, Eric Delaporte and Martine Peeters, a virologist at TransVIHMI, continued their investigative work in Africa to trace the origins of HIV and track the spread of the epidemic.“Jean-Jacques was also conducting research on HIV and wanted to develop collaborations. That’s how we began training students together, including Steve Ahuka-Mundeke, now head of the virology unit at INRB, and Placide Mbala, head of the molecular biology unit,” continues the French infectious disease specialist.

TransVIHMI and INRB will thus carry out numerous collaborative projects on the genetic diversity of HIV in Kinshasa, thereby confirming the Congolese capital as the point of origin of the global AIDS epidemic. They will also work on the diversity of simian retroviruses to identify new viruses and monitor the emergence of resistance to antiretroviral drugs used to treat HIV. The two teams continue to work closely together on numerous projects, notably ARIACOV, which aims to track the dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Africa.

The Return of Ebola

Between 2000 and 2020, numerous Ebola outbreaks continued to occur across the African continent. While most of them were quickly brought under control, a major epidemic first emerged in Guinea in 2013 and rapidly spread to other West African countries. A few isolated cases were even reported in Europe and the United States. The two-year epidemic claimed between 15,000 and 20,000 lives. Blood transfusions from survivors, which had been successfully tested in 1995, proved to be of no significant efficacy during this epidemic. Nevertheless, Professor Muyembe did not abandon this approach and, with the support of an American team, continued his research on monoclonal antibodies derived from a survivor’s blood.

In 2018, two new Ebola outbreaks broke out in the DRC. Despite the civil war, which significantly worsened the situation, the research conducted enabled better management of the outbreak:“The compound developed by Jean-Jacques Muyembe and named Ebanga made it possible to validate the first curative treatment for Zaire Ebola. At the same time, it also contributed to the development and evaluation of a vaccine, which is now in operational use,” explains Eric Delaporte. The collaboration with TransVIHMI also led to the identification of the viral strain responsible for the outbreak, enabling better diagnosis and monitoring of the outbreak through contact tracing using new molecular biology techniques.

International recognition

A leading figure in his country in both the scientific and political spheres, thanks to his role in public health management, Jean-Jacques Muyembe now enjoys an international reputation. A recipient in France of the Institut de France’s Mérieux Prize, winner of the prestigious Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize, which was presented to him in Tokyo in 2019, and an honorary doctorate from Harvard… The journal Nature, for its part, ranked him among the ten most influential scientists of 2018–2019. “At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most prominent figures, and despite all this, he has always remained remarkably down-to-earth. He is someone who refuses to take himself too seriously and who handles irony with great finesse, ” continues Eric Delaporte.

Following pediatrician Chipepo Kankasa (Zambia), media specialist Tawana Kupe (South Africa), and gynecologist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Denis Mukwege (DRC), the University of Montpellier reaffirms, through its honorary doctors, its commitment to continuing and expanding its close collaborations with the best of African research and to supporting it by all available means. To this end, the Prisme DRC agreement for an “international global health research platform in the Democratic Republic of the Congo” was signed following the ceremony in the presence of Jean-Jacques Muyembe, director of the INRB, Body Ilonga, Secretary General of the Ministry of Public Health of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Yazdan Yazdanpanah, Director of ANRS-Emerging Infectious Diseases, Yves Martin-Prével, Director of the IRD Health Department, and Philippe Augé, President of the University of Montpellier.