Discussion for article #225956
I heard about this on NPR earlier today. The treatment is derived from the blood of a few people who managed to survive the disease and had developed protective antibodies in their blood, very similar to the method we now use to treat for tetanus.
And does it seem weird to anyone else that tobacco companies are involved in the search for a cure?
CNN’s version implied that the FDA did act under “compassionate care” provisions. Since the company was from San Diego, it’s hard to envision them just shipping drugs to other countries without FDA approval.
Apparently the FDA didn’t hear the part about how government isn’t supposed to do anything right and only gets in the way. Sounds like they approved something very out-of-the-norm and may have saved two lives as a result.
Let’s hope this medicine gets fast tracked for “compassionate care” for Africans caught in the epidemic, too.
That and apparently a long standing Defense Department involvement
Producing foreign proteins in tobacco plants (and cells) is an old biotechnology trick. The plants pretty much become protein factories, and you can grow a lot of them. It is very cost effective and safer in some regards compared to other methods to mass produce biotech products. I did experiments along those lines several years ago. It was kinda fun imagining how this scourge of humanity could be turned to do some good.
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“The hospital in Atlanta treating the aid workers has one of the nation’s most sophisticated infectious disease units.”
And, if they get in over their heads, it’s only a half-mile up Clifton Road to CDC headquarters, where they know all about safely managing infectious disease!
Let’s hear it for government-controlled health care.
As perfectly illustrated by the Onion headline from a few days ago: “Experts: Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People Away”
Well that headline better than one exclaiming that experimental drug tested on “black people”. Don’t want Michele Bachman getting any ideas do we, she might want to do a switch and bait, bring in black Africans for “medical experimentation” instead of migrant children from Central America.
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Actually what I read on Ars Technica is that it was a lot more complicated to derive the treatment. The antibodies were actually created in lab mice. Then the mouse-specific parts of the genes of the antibodies were cut out, and human-specific parts were spliced in. Then they put the genes into tobacco plant cells for mass production.
Just amazing.
Treating humans with something new, before it is ready for primetime, is an ethical swampland. There is the very real risk of causing harm, the producers are conflicted up the wazoo, the patients are desperate for anything, etc and so forth. Add third world to the equation and you’ve got a massive exploitation factor. These are really hard problems.