By Jon Fleetwood
Experiments on functional enhancement, in which pathogens are mutated to make them resistant to drugs, are an integral part of virological drug development.
An international research consortium, including leading institutions from the United States, China, the United Kingdom and Germany, claims to have successfully bred mutant strains of the Orthoebola virus that are resistant to the neutralizing effect of the monoclonal antibody mAb 11886.
They published their work on May 7 in npj Viruses, just days before the 2026 Ebola outbreak was first officially reported by the Ministry of Health of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
These Ebola experiments, conducted under BSL-4 conditions at the Philipps University of Marburg, involved the targeted creation and selection of alleged virus variants that circumvent therapeutic neutralization.
The experiments comply with the published definitions of “Gain-of-Function” (GOF).
According to a review article published in Advances in Applied Microbiology in 2022:
“Gain-of-function research on viruses aims to increase transmissibility, viral replication, virulence, host range, immune evasion, or resistance to drugs and vaccines in order to gain insights into viral mechanisms, develop and analyze animal models, accelerate the development of drugs and vaccines, and improve pandemic preparedness.”
The new Ebola study is alleged to have led to the creation of mutated, drug-resistant Ebola pathogens in the name of drug development.
This raises international security concerns, as Congress, the White House, the Department of Energy, the FBI, the CIA and the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) have all confirmed that the COVID-19 pandemic was “likely” the result of a laboratory accident involving genetically modified pathogens.
You can contact the NIAID here, the NIH here, and the HHS here to express your opposition to taxpayer-funded research on pandemic-causing pathogens.
Several US government Ebola preparedness and response programs were administratively updated in the federal Assistance Listings database in mid-January 2026 – about three to four months before health authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo announced the latest Ebola outbreak.
The Trump administration is now requesting more than $1.4 billion in Ebola aid from Congress, shortly after the CDC released $107 million in emergency funds to combat Ebola.
US taxpayers are now funding both the creation of mutated, drug-resistant Ebola pathogens and the government’s costly measures to combat Ebola.
Researchers are forcing the virus to develop resistance.
To create these drug-resistant mutants, the researchers state that they used a replicable version of the virus known as EbolaΔVP30.
The team explains that it accelerated the evolution of the virus by subjecting it to three consecutive 6-day passenger cycles.
During these cycles, the virus was allegedly exposed to increasing concentrations of the antibody mAb 11886, starting at 0.63 µg/ml and increasing to 5.0 µg/ml, in order to promote the selection of mutations that could survive the treatment.
Following this process, the team isolated individual plaques that were able to survive in the presence of 10 µg/ml of the antibody.
Finally, the researchers stated that they had extracted viral RNA and sequenced the glycoprotein gene to identify the specific genetic mutations responsible for the acquired resistance.
The experiments identified two specific genetic mutations that are resistant to drugs.
The sequencing analysis is said to have identified two specific genetic mutations that directly negated the effectiveness of the antibody.
The first mutation, known as V505I, is located at the N-terminus of GP2 and has been identified as the main cause of resistance to mAb 11886.
The second mutation, known as T402I, is thought to be located in the mucin-like domain and contributed to resistance through indirect effects on how the virus processes its supposed surface proteins.
Experimental data from the study confirmed that each of these mutations, when present individually, was sufficient for the virus to evade neutralization at a concentration of 10 µg/ml.
Research supported by an international network of funders and institutions
The creation of these drug-resistant Ebola variants was made possible by a global network of funding organizations and partnerships between science and industry.
In the United Kingdom, the research was supported by the British Medical Research Council through an iCASE PhD grant for FRD (MR/N01796X/1) and by the Wellcome Trust through a Senior Fellowship for SJD (106917/Z/15/Z).
In Germany, the work was supported by the German Research Foundation through a grant to TS (197785619/SFB1021).
In China, funding was provided through grants from the Innovation Fund for Medical Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences to PR and AT (2024-12M-2-001-1 and 2018-12M-2-002).
In the United States, the research was supported by the National Institutes of Health through grant U19 AI109762 to EOS.
