On Sept 19 2014, Eric Duncan boarded a plane travelling from Monrovia to Dallas. Shortly after landing in the state of Texas, Duncan was admitted to hospital complaining of headaches and nausea. Within days he would become the first Ebola patient diagnosed on US soil.

What followed was a race to track down all of those Duncan had come into contact with following his return from West Africa: family, friends, medical staff. A number of other people were soon found to be positive for the virus.

Duncan’s tragic case demonstrates how easy it is in a highly interconnected global society for pathogens to spread. Almost overnight, Ebola had travelled halfway around the world and found its way into an urban American community.

Viruses like Ebola can spread fairly quickly. But there’s a lot of hope in the fight against global pandemics. Because while diseases can move quickly, modern technology is helping scientists to respond quicker.

The average time it takes for a drug to make it from invention to the counter is about 12 years. But when a pandemic hits, we simply can’t wait that long. That’s why scientists are pursuing ways of creating drugs that are safer, more effective and – crucially – quicker to develop.

In a recent breakthrough, scientists in Oxford last month uncovered a promising new tool in the fight against Ebola. The group from Oxford University and Diamond successfully captured atomic images of an anticancer drug, called Toremifine, interacting with and disabling a key mechanism that allows the Ebola virus to survive.

If this drug can be properly refined, it may provide an effective medical treatment to fight off Ebola infection. But that’s not all; the really exciting thing about the scientists’ discovery is that it comes off the back of an existing drug: a pill we already know is safe to swallow.

And this is crucial, because if we already know what we’re working with, the drug design process is considerably swifter.

The key to all of this is being able to manipulate the structure of the drugs we take on the smallest level imaginable. Up until very recently, one of the key strategies scientists used to develop medicines was trial and error. They would test hundreds, even thousands of compounds, just hoping to get a match. Or else new drugs were simply stumbled upon; discovered by chance – penicillin, for example.

But now that technology has advanced, scientists are better able to explore how the drugs work, right down to the very atoms. With this level of detail, it’s possible to restructure existing drugs to make them more effective.

Or to develop them into hitting a completely different target: like switching from cancer to Ebola.

There’s still a long way to go before an Ebola drug hits the market. We’ll still need to evolve the drug into something that has a more pronounced effect on the virus, and we’ll need to make sure that there aren’t any unintended side-effects for patients suffering with the disease.

But thanks to advanced technology and scientific ingenuity, we hope to find powerful new compounds more quickly that we could have ever hoped for in the past.

The Ebola discovery is just one step forward in the fight against global pandemics, but it does demonstrate something quite significant: pandemics may move quickly, but science is becoming much quicker.