Mapp’s Ebola Drug Shows Promise, But Making More Will Take Time

Ebola virus

The experimental drug therapy given to two Americans and a Spaniard stricken with the lethal Ebola virus was still in research studies when the Ebola outbreak erupted this year in West Africa.

Most of the available material was “laboratory-grade, not human-grade,” said Erica Ollman Saphire, a structural biologist whose lab at The Scripps Research Institute helped San Diego-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical identify antibody targets on the surface of the Ebola virus.

A human trial was scheduled for 2015, and the small amount of human-grade material that was produced has been exhausted, Saphire said. It will take months to make more, because it was derived from genetically engineered tobacco plants that require months to grow.

Structural Biologist Erica Ollman Saphire, TSRI, Ebola
Erica Ollman Saphire

Saphire, an expert in X-ray crystallography, talked with Xconomy by phone yesterday from upstate New York, where she’s on vacation. She is director of a global consortium that includes 25 research institutes in seven countries working to discover new products and techniques for diagnosing and treating Ebola and related viral hemorrhagic fevers. The NIH provided a five-year grant in March for as much as $28 million to identify monoclonal antibodies that can be used to fight Ebola and related viruses.

ZMapp, the drug developed by Mapp Bio that was administered to the three Christian aid workers, is a drug cocktail that combines three “humanized” monoclonal antibodies. Mapp Bio and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases had developed one of the monoclonal antibodies, Sapphire said. The other two came from the Public Health Agency of Canada.

Mapp Bio provided the doses of ZMapp that were given earlier this month to Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, the volunteer missionaries who were helping to care for Ebola patients in Liberia. Both were airlifted back to the U.S. after they were given ZMapp, and admitted to a special isolation unit at Emory University hospital in Atlanta.

Brantly is expected to be released soon, according to a statement yesterday from the Christian aid group Samaritan’s Purse, and Writebol is reported to be improving.

Word that Brantly and Writebol had received a

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.