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A woman wears protective clothing during a tour of one of the Ebola Centers in Harare, Zimbabwe, Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2014.Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/The Associated Press

An international consortium has announced that it is racing to begin clinical trials on a handful of experimental Ebola treatments – including two with Canadian connections – at the heart of the rapidly spreading epidemic in West Africa.

News of a £3.2-million ($5.25-million U.S.) grant from Britain's Wellcome Trust and of a plan to speed up delivery of barely tested therapies to the Africans who need them most came as two new forecasts laid bare just how devastating the Ebola outbreak could become if a recent surge in aid does not stop it now.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that between 550,000 and 1.4 million people could be infected by January, a prediction the CDC's director said was extrapolated from data in mid-August, before the United States announced its plan to send 3,000 troops and erect 17 new treatment centres to combat the virus.

EBOLA: WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW

Tom Frieden said he was confident the worst-case scenario would not come to pass, so long as the world acts swiftly to contain an outbreak ravaging one of the poorest corners of Africa.

"A surge now can break the back of this epidemic," Dr. Frieden said. "But the costs of delay are significant … every day counts."

A separate projection released by the World Health Organization and published in the New England Journal of Medicine warned the number of cases could reach 21,000 within six weeks – much earlier than the WHO's previous worst-case predictions – and even become a permanent fixture of life in West Africa.

On the ground in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, the focus remains on trying to massively scale up traditional means of combatting the viral hemorrhagic fever, such as treating the sick with supportive care, tracing and isolating their contacts, and ensuring that bodies of the dead are disposed of safely.

But the bleak predictions about how long it could take to tame the epidemic mean there may be time still for experimental Ebola treatments and vaccines to help, even if only in a small way. Whatever lessons are garnered this time could be applied in future outbreaks.

The plan revealed Tuesday by the Wellcome Trust, a British health charity, and eight other organizations, including the WHO and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), is to set up clinical trials in the affected countries and then have the WHO facilitate access to the treatments in co-operation with local officials. The group has not named the sites or a start date.

However, the consortium mentioned by name three companies it is already speaking to about the efficacy, safety and production abilities of their investigational treatments, including Mapp Biopharmaceutical, the California company that makes the Canadian-developed drug ZMapp, and Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corp., the Vancouver firm that produces TKM-Ebola.

TKM-Ebola, which relies on a substance called single-interfering RNA to silence part of the Ebola virus's genetic code, has now been tried on at least a few Ebola patients, the company said Monday.

One of those patients was Rick Sacra, a 51-year-old American doctor airlifted out of Liberia in early September and transferred to the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, where he is now recovering. Dr. Sacra received TKM-Ebola for seven days, starting when he arrived Sept. 5, according to the hospital.

He is expected to make a full recovery, but it is unclear what role the experimental drug might have played in his outcome. He also received top-notch supportive care and a blood transfusion from Ebola survivor Kent Brantly, one of the first two American aid workers to be flown out of the outbreak zone and treated in the U.S.

Dr. Brantly was also one of seven known patients to have received ZMapp, a cocktail of three monoclonal antibodies developed largely at Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. Five of those patients lived and two died.

Supplies of that drug are now exhausted, while those of TKM-Ebola are limited to fewer than 30 treatment courses. Both companies are working to produce more as quickly as they can.

With reports from wire services

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