PALM was first conceived following the 2018 Ebola virus epidemic in the North Kivu and Ituri provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo, when the World Health Organization initiated a series of discussions and working groups to determine how experimental therapeutics should be assessed in the context of the next Ebola virus disease outbreak. The first study, PALM 001, aimed to evaluate the most promising experimental therapeutics for treating EVD in a randomized, controlled trial. The study concluded that both Mab114 and REGN-EB3 were superior to ZMapp and remdesivir for reducing mortality from Ebola virus disease and showed that scientifically and ethically sound research could be conducted during disease outbreaks.
Today, PALM has grown to include eight clinical trials across four sites in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
PALM has also expanded its scope to include other infectious diseases of global concern, including COVID-19, monkeypox, and malaria, and has established several large biorepositories with hundreds of thousands of samples from recent Ebola virus disease outbreaks, COVID-19, and more. In conjunction with the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Institut National de la Recherche Biomédicale, PALM’s goal is to continue growing as a resource for researching infectious diseases and improving global health.
Publications
SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence in vaccine-naïve participants from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, Liberia, and Mali, International Journal of Infectious Diseases, 2024
The surge of mpox in Africa: a call for action, Lancet Global Health, 2024
Sustained Human Outbreak of a New MPXV Clade I Lineage in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nature Medicine, 2024
SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence in vaccine-naïve participants from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, Liberia, and Mali, International Journal of Infectious Diseases, 2024
On the importance and challenges of global access to proven life-saving treatments for Ebolavirus, Lancet Infectious Diseases (Correspondence), 2023
Counting Monkeypox Lesions in Patient Photographs: Limits of Agreement of Manual Counts and Artificial Intelligence. Journal of Investigative Dermatology, Journal of Investigative Dermatology, 2023
Neurologic Complications of Smallpox and Monkeypox: A Review, JAMA Neurology, 2022
Potential complications of monkeypox, Lancet Neurology, 2022
Development of the PREDS Score to Predict In-Hospital Mortality of Patients With Ebola Virus Disease Under Advanced Supportive Care: Results From the EVISTA Cohort in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lancet eClinical Medicine, 2022
Design of an observational multi-country cohort study to assess immunogenicity of multiple vaccine platforms (InVITE), PLoS One, 2022
Ebola virus persistence and disease recrudescence in the brains of antibody-treated nonhuman primate survivors, Science Translational Medicine, 2022
Contact Information
For more information about PALM and the Collaborative Clinical Research Branch (CCRB), please email CCRB_INFO@niaid.nih.gov.
About CCRB
Read about Collaborative Clinical Research Branch (CCRB).