News of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa last year struck Kathleen Daddario DiCaprio as surreal and frustrating.

Surreal because the 34-year-old Schenectady native had repeatedly written about the likelihood of such an outbreak between 2003 and 2008, when applying for grants as one of a select team of scientists working with the deadly virus at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md.

Frustrating because that USAMRIID team had identified a potential vaccine for Ebola and proved that it worked in monkeys. But by the time she left the lab, the post-9/11 government funding that had supported the team's research on two potential bioterrorist agents, Ebola and Marburg viruses, had tapered off. With Ebola outbreaks then known to affect only a few hundred people at a time, other drug developers did not see a market to justify the enormous expense of testing the vaccine on people.

"It had just been sitting on a shelf for years," DiCaprio said last week from a laboratory at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, where she earned a bachelor's degree in biochemistry in 2002.

The vaccine DiCaprio helped develop, known as rVSV-EBOV, is one of two currently being tested on people to see if it might help prevent the further spread of Ebola, which has infected more than 22,000 people and killed nearly 9,000 in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia in the last year.

That promise brings joy to the exuberant scientist, who was drawn to know and quash the savage germ the moment she learned about it, as a brand-new doctoral student at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, a military medical school in Bethesda, Md.

DiCaprio was smitten by a presentation on Ebola by virologist Thomas W. Geisbert. She knew little of the disease and was fascinated by what she called "the blood and guts" of the hemorrhagic fever virus, which can cause bleeding from multiple organs and orifices. Until then her lab work involved tissue cultures and rodents. Geisbert experimented with a live virus on rhesus macaques, whose response to disease closely mimics humans' reactions.

DiCaprio wanted into his lab.

"That was the coolest thing I've ever seen," the then-23-year-old told Geisbert after his presentation.

She recalled Geisbert's unusual initial reaction. He took her hands in his, stared at them, flipped them over. He seemed pleased, told her he was on his way to Asia and would be in touch when he returned.

Months later, when the diminutive DiCaprio — she's 5 feet tall and weighs 98 pounds — was suited up, injecting a rhesus macaque in the high-containment, biosafety level 4 laboratory with the live, wiggly Ebola virus, she understood what Geisbert was looking for.

"I have small, steady hands," DiCaprio said. "It turned out I was very good in the lab because of it."

Her job would also involve conducting autopsies on the macaques that died.

DiCaprio was not immediately allowed in the BSL-4 lab, reserved for the most dangerous, highly infectious pathogens that pose the greatest risk to researchers. Geisbert first placed her in a BSL-3 lab for six months, where she studied the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

When she got to the BSL-4 lab, she was filled with awe.

"You feel like you're in the movies," she said.

Daily, she stripped down in the locker room — "you're commando, you've just got to get used to it" — pressed her finger against a keypad that verified her identity, then stepped into a metal shower for a disinfecting soak. Next, she donned scrubs and the blue suit that allowed breathing through a filter. Then she put on her gloves and taped them down.

"What comes between you and the deadliest virus in the world?" DiCaprio asked. "Duct tape. It's scary."

When DiCaprio says it could get scary, she means it. Before 2004, no disease alarmed scientists for its deadliness more than Ebola, DiCaprio said. Then came the outbreak of Marburg virus in Angola. DiCaprio recalled the day they received the strain of that virus in the lab, how steam came off the dry ice when she twisted the jar open, how she then injected it into the monkeys.

With Ebola, the macaques got really sick by the fourth day of infection. They had fevers and rashes, and big drops in T-cells, which fight infection. On the fourth morning after infecting the monkeys with the Angola strain of Marburg virus, the research team walked in to find the macaques dead.

"Get out!" DiCaprio recalled Geisbert telling her.

The researchers were testing a vaccine based on the vesicular stomatitis virus, or VSV. Once they demonstrated its effectiveness in preventing illness in monkeys, they wanted to see if it would work as a treatment for monkeys that had been infected. Most vaccines do not work this way, as a treatment after exposure to a virus, but a few, such as the rabies vaccine, do.

These post-exposure experiments with VSV were successful for Marburg, promising but not 100 percent effective for Ebola. DiCaprio was first among authors on a paper published in The Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, detailing their work.

"At that time, the finding was amazing," she said.

Despite the danger of the lab — or maybe because of it — DiCaprio loved working at USAMRIID, she said. She started her days at 5 a.m. and finished at 11 p.m., fueled by the importance of the research, and by knowing how rare an opportunity she had. Few other labs in the world worked on Ebola.

"I had this sexy, cool virus," DiCaprio said. "Anything I did, I had a good chance of publishing that."

In addition to The Lancet, the team published in such well-respected journals as Nature Medicine and the Journal of Virology.

Pharmaceutical giant Merck and Iowa-based NewLink Genetics are currently testing the rVSV-EBOV vaccine on people, in collaboration with the Public Health Agency of Canada, which supported the work of the USAMRIID team and holds the patent, according to DiCaprio. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has kicked in $30 million for the drug's development.

DiCaprio won't benefit financially if the vaccine proves successful in humans. But she has highlighted the experience on her curriculum vitae, in hopes it will boost her career.

DiCaprio now teaches at the Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in New York and is program chair for The College of Graduate Health Studies, an online school of A.T. Still University. She'd like to move back to the Capital Region, she said.

And despite frustration over how long it's taken to advance the use of rVSV-EBOV, she's thrilled to see such promise in work she has done.

"You're just happy that there's something out there for these people," DiCaprio said. "This is a disease that kills."

chughes@timesunion.com • 518-454-5417 • @hughesclaire