When Dawid Zyla started studying measles in 2020 at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in San Diego, his colleagues sometimes questioned why he would devote his career to a virus of the past.
Measles had been kept at bay in the United States for more than two decades thanks to a remarkably effective vaccine. Though there are no approved treatments for the virus, researching one seemed like a waste of precious funding, especially as a new coronavirus was taking off and there were still no vaccines to combat deadly species of Ebola.
“There was zero interest in it,” said Dr. Zyla, who recently became a professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine. “Measles was like a solved issue back then.”
That all changed in 2025, when a series of outbreaks popped up in unvaccinated communities across the country, making it the worst year for measles in the United States since 1991. Dr. Zyla suddenly found himself at the center of a “very crowded” hunt for new measles therapeutics that could prevent or treat infections.
Just this year, two U.S. biotechnology companies announced they would begin testing antibody treatments, one of them citing “measles incidence reaching levels not seen in decades.” Another biotech company recently began animal testing of an antiviral. Two academic groups, including the lab where Dr. Zyla worked, have published promising early results on experimental drugs they are developing.
It’s too early to know whether these drugs might be effective, and it would likely be years before any of them reach patients. But as measles continues to spread, some companies are betting on the fact that there will be a market for them that didn’t exist just a few years ago.
This investment comes amid a growing recognition among public health experts that, in an era of vaccine hesitancy, it may no longer be possible to prevent measles outbreaks in the United States. It’s now necessary to find ways to mitigate the fallout, said Michael Osterholm, a public health expert at the University of Minnesota.
“We realize that the vaccine isn’t going to get us out of this,” he said.
The groups trying to develop new treatments are trying several approaches. One team of researchers from Georgia State University is developing an antiviral pill, designed to stop the virus from replicating and becoming a full-blown infection. Or, if doctors gave it to patients early enough in an infection, it could prevent it from getting worse.
Another camp — including biotech companies Invivyd and Saravir — are focused on developing monoclonal antibodies, which could eventually be given as an infusion to those most vulnerable in a measles outbreak, like babies too young for the measles vaccine and those with compromised immune systems.
These drugs could potentially help contain an outbreak, said Dr. Michael Mina, chief medical officer at Invivyd. If people at the center of an outbreak — especially those wary of vaccines — took a drug that temporarily protected against the virus, it could stop the chain of transmission.
The fact that there is no treatment for measles — which has infected humans for as long as we’ve lived in cities — is not because the underlying science is particularly difficult. In fact, the virus has many Achilles’ heels that drugs can target, said Erica Ollmann Saphire, who leads the San Diego lab where Dr. Zyla began his measles research.
Instead, the hunt for a measles treatment was stymied for decades by a simple calculation: The number of cases in wealthy countries was low and the cost of developing drugs was high, with little promise that drug companies would recoup their investment.
When Richard Plemper first stumbled across a promising antiviral for measles in his lab at Emory University in the early 2000s, he thought that a cheap, easy to store pill (unlike the vaccine, which needs to be refrigerated) could help control measles in poorer parts of the world, where the virus still infected hundreds of thousands of children every year.
Paul Rota, a measles researcher who was collaborating with Dr. Plemper, said one person they approached about industry buy-in told them: “‘It looks like this is a very good drug, but we don’t see a use for it.’”
Some in the scientific community also worried that the effort would undermine the simple public health message that had been repeated for generations: Vaccination is the only way to protect yourself against measles.
Even last year, when Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced he would direct the Department of Health and Human Services to investigate promising new measles treatments, experts worried it would erode public confidence in vaccines.
While many public health experts still don’t agree with Mr. Kennedy’s focus on untested supplements like cod liver oil, or his emphasis on providing options for the vaccine hesitant, they said that the need for treatment has become more obvious as more children have been sickened across the country.
Doctors could only offer these children supportive care, like oxygen and Tylenol, to make them more comfortable as they weathered the infection.
“Basically, you’re always a day behind, treating the signs and symptoms of what happened yesterday,” Dr. Osterholm said.
Most children recovered within a few weeks without major complications. Others have not been not so lucky. Two otherwise healthy little girls in Texas died from measles complications last year, the first such deaths in the United States in a decade. Children sickened during other recent outbreaks have developed serious brain swelling and severe pneumonia.
With measles vaccination rates now below 95 percent among American kindergartners, the threshold required to prevent outbreaks from taking off, experts fear these large outbreaks are becoming the country’s new normal.
Saravir, one of the biotech companies developing a measles antibody treatment, now sees “a potential multi-billion dollar market opportunity.” Dr. Ronald Moss, the company’s chief executive, cited figures showing that in the United States and the European Union — where measles has also resurged — there are more than 7 million babies, 26 million people with compromised immune systems and 11 million pregnant women, all of whom are uniquely vulnerable to measles.
Even if a small percentage of that market ends up becoming exposed to the virus, he said, “that’s a pretty big population that we would want to protect.”
If the drug makes it through trials, he expects the infusions to cost roughly $2,500. (Antibody treatments are generally more expensive than antiviral pills.)
Other companies, less certain of the potential return on investment, have decided to pursue paths traditionally used for rare disease treatments, such as asking the Food and Drug Administration for orphan drug status. This offers financial incentives to develop drugs for conditions that affect fewer than 200,000 people nationwide.
Dr. Plemper, burned from his failed attempt to generate interest in his measles drug, moved onto an antiviral for parainfluenza, a virus in the same family. Now a researcher at Georgia State University, Dr. Plemper hopes that doctors will be able to use it off-label for measles if the drug is approved.
Dr. Mina and others trying to develop treatments said vaccination is still the best way to reverse the tide on measles. But in the meantime, he said, “nobody should have to die from it.”
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