Posted on 08/04/2014 10:52:41 PM PDT by blueplum
A tiny company in Sorrento Mesa helped develop the serum that may have saved the lives of two American aid workers stricken with the Ebola virus in Liberia in recent days.
Mapp Biopharmaceutical and its experimental ZMapp product were virtually unknown until Monday, when word spread of the serum that seems to have stabilized Dr. Kent Brantly and missionary Nancy Writebol. Now the biotech firm is being publicly mentioned by everyone from health officials in numerous countries, to news organizations worldwide, to social-media users.
The spotlight is also being cast on The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, where scientist Erica Ollmann Saphire is leading an international research consortium that includes Mapp. The partners, backed by a $28 million grant from the National Institutes of Health awarded in March, are on a quest to find treatments against Ebola — or even a vaccine for it.
:snip:
Samaritan Purse’s outreach resulted in Mapp Biopharmaceutical sending three frozen vials of ZMapp to Liberia last week. The privately held biotech company has just nine employees, and it has only tested its cocktail of antibodies on a small number of monkeys with mixed success.
While health experts caution that it’s too early to declare ZMapp as a lifesaver that boosts the immune system’s battle against Ebola, news reports are citing the aid workers’ colleagues and family members as saying Brantly and Writebol got better after being given the product. But it might never be known whether the patients were improving on their own or got a crucial advantage from the serum.
Brantly received the first dose — by intravenous drip — because his condition was deteriorating more quickly, according to anonymous sources quoted by CNN. It’s unclear why the three vials didn’t thaw at the same rate.
Within an hour of getting the serum,
(Excerpt) Read more at utsandiego.com ...
It must be great fun to go to work at Mapp Biopharmaceutical this week.
Ping...
Once you invent the serum, you then have to produce it in useful quantities. That's where RJ Reynolds comes in.
thanks for the link, cynwoody. I didn’t know that MAPP has been working on this for 7 years. wow!
Indeed! Nothing succeeds like success!
Post to me or FReep mail to be on/off the Bring Out Your Dead ping list.
The purpose of the “Bring Out Your Dead” ping list (formerly the “Ebola” ping list) is very early warning of emerging pandemics, as such it has a high false positive rate.
So far the false positive rate is 100%.
At some point we may well have a high mortality pandemic, and likely as not the “Bring Out Your Dead” threads will miss the beginning entirely.
*sigh* Such is life, and death...
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