Ebola ‘Secret Serum’: Small Biopharma, The Army, And Big Tobacco
David Kroll
Forbes.com
8/05/2014
CNN reported yesterday that American missionary Ebola patients, Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writesbol, received an experimental “secret serum” against the virus while hospitalized in Liberia.
But while the biotech product, called ZMapp™, is indeed still experimental – it’s not yet approved for human use, and not yet even in phase I clinical trials – it’s far from secret.
The three-antibody mixture originated with Mapp Biopharmaceuticals, a small San Diego-based company established in 2003 and led by Larry Zeitlin, Ph.D., a Johns Hopkins-trained reproductive biologist who became an expert in “plantibodies,” antibody therapeutics produced in, and purified from, bioengineered plants.
The ZMapp three-antibody cocktail isn’t a vaccine. Instead, it provides an artifical immune response against sugar-tagged proteins on the outside of the Ebolavirus.
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