Amid a fast-moving Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the scientific community has mobilised with breakneck speed to find ways to stamp out the virus.

It’s an effort grounded in years of knowledge gleaned from previous outbreaks — of Ebola, of course, but also Covid, mpox and other pathogens that have caught the world off-guard. And it’s proceeding remarkably quickly: within little more than a week of the World Health Organisation declaring an emergency, experts had homed in on the best potential treatments and vaccine candidates and had a good sense of how to test them.

True, none of what’s ready right now is a perfect match for this species of Ebola, known as Bundibugyo virus. But in a perfect world, even modestly effective interventions would help health workers contain the spread and save lives.

If only the science were enough.

With the number of suspected cases nearing 1,100 and nearly 240 suspected deaths, global health leaders are navigating a complex reality on the ground. This week, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organisation, warned that parts of the DRC face “a catastrophic collision of disease and conflict”. Aid workers and health facilities have been attacked, and misinformation about Ebola and distrust of humanitarian help is rampant. His assessment of the situation was bleak: “It will get worse before it gets better.”

That’s complicated efforts to do even the basics, like isolating people infected with the deadly disease and identifying everyone exposed — let alone running a clinical trial. Still, the desperate need for more tools to slow the spread requires pushing forward.

There are no authorised vaccines or treatments for Bundibugyo virus, which had previously caused just two small outbreaks — the most recent over a decade ago. Researchers had instead focused their attention on haemorrhagic fever-causing pathogens expected to cause problems in the future — namely, the Zaire and Sudan species of Ebola, and Marburg viruses.

Still, scientists have some reasonable starting points to lessen the toll of Bundibugyo, and know how to conduct a trial that can quickly determine what works. That’s a huge advance over earlier Ebola epidemics, when standing up clinical studies took many months.

Much of what’s available to deal with the Zaire variety of Ebola — the source of the prior two large outbreaks — has a chance of working on Bundibugyo, although by how much remains in question. That’s because pieces of the viruses are similar enough that vaccines and treatments developed for one could potentially work for the other.

Among the already-available treatments that have been studied in Zaire virus, Gilead Sciences’ remdesivir, developed during the 2014-2016 West Africa outbreak, seems a good fit. The drug works by jamming up the machinery the virus uses to make copies of itself — machinery that looks quite similar across many different types of viruses. It disappointed in clinical studies in humans infected with Zaire virus, but lab tests suggest it could be more potent when treating people infected with Bundibugyo.

Meanwhile, there’s hope that an oral version of remdesivir called obeldesivir could keep people exposed to the virus from developing the disease. In the past two years, several studies have shown the drug can prevent infections in monkeys exposed to other Ebola-causing viruses. Immunologist Courtney Woolsey, one of the University of Texas Medical Branch researchers testing many of these treatments in animals, told me her lab is testing the concept with Bundibugyo virus. But that approach has yet to be evaluated in humans.

Other promising interventions are focused on the piece of the virus called the glycoprotein, which it uses to glom onto a human cell and pull itself inside. The glycoproteins made by Bundibugyo and Zaire viruses are the most similar among the filoviruses — about a 70 per cent match, explains Erica Ollmann Saphire, a professor at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology. Studies by Saphire and others have found that people who have been infected with Zaire virus make some antibodies that react to Bundibugyo.

Indeed, the most promising antibody therapy for Bundibugyo was discovered by researchers sifting through hundreds of antibodies generated by a survivor of the West Africa outbreak in search of any that might offer broad protection against Ebola viruses. One worked on its own, while a second was engineered to improve its ability to neutralise multiple strains of the virus.

Together, they formed the basis of an antibody cocktail being developed by Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc that, along with remdesivir, the WHO, DRC and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention have prioritised for testing amid this outbreak. (Bloomberg separately reported this week that the DRC has formally requested access to a drug that appears to be the Mapp cocktail.)

The similarity between the Zaire and Bundibugyo glycoproteins initially generated hope that the existing Ebola vaccine, developed for the Zaire virus, could offer at least some protection against Bundibugyo. But the data supporting that theory are very limited.

The Zaire vaccine is available, making it a hard-to-ignore option. Yet the uncertainty of whether it would offer sufficient — or even any — protection in humans has prompted developers to expedite the development of shots specifically targeting the Bundibugyo glycoprotein.

The question, of course, is whether any of these treatments can be tested and rolled out in time to make a difference. The world has learnt so much about how to respond to a crisis, yet the tension is worsening between scientific advances and the realities that make it difficult to translate them into lives saved.

A sweeping analysis of the state of pandemic readiness following nearly a decade of health emergencies foresaw this moment.

“Preparedness efforts are being outpaced by new and more complex stressors, including pandemic risks, geopolitical instability, and rapidly evolving information ecosystems,” concluded a recent report from the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, which was convened by the WHO and the World Bank in 2018 after two deadly Ebola outbreaks.

That portends a bleak future. We keep honing the scientific playbook for addressing an emerging threat, but it can’t be put to use when those broader societal stressors go ignored. The report warns that future crises will be more disruptive and harder to manage. With this outbreak, that future has arrived.

• Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, healthcare and the pharmaceutical industry. Previously, she was executive editor of Chemical & Engineering News