Canadian company testing an experimental drug against Ebola has stopped the trial and said that they have failed to figure out if the drug is of any help to treat the deadly disease. The drug was being tested by Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corporation in patients in Sierra Leone. The company said it couldn't determine if the drug was providing benefits to patients.

The company said in a statement that the Phase II trial of TKM-Ebola-Guinea has come to an end and enrollment has been closed now.

Thomas Geisbert, an expert in infectious diseases at the University of Texas Medical Branch, said the end of the trial not at all means that the drug is not effective; it's just shows complexities associated with testing drugs on real patients during epidemics.

The drug was tested on monkeys and Geisbert said that the version of the drug tested in Sierra Leone was not the same that had completely protected monkeys from a lethal dose of virus.

Geisbert said that product is not the best one and is not what they had tested in monkeys. More than 27,000 people have been infected by Ebola in an ongoing epidemic in West Africa. Over 11,000 of them have succumbed to the disease.

No treatment has been approved for the disease so far and it has a death rate of 50% or more. "Do you give this product because it's better than nothing or do you take the safe approach and say sorry, we don't want to play?" Geisbert asked.