Ebola 'Secret Serum': Small Biopharma, The Army, And Big Tobacco

The American missionary Ebola patients, Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, 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.

 This general biotherapeutic approach is called passive immunity. By injecting the patient with ready-made antibodies raised in the laboratory to latch onto specific parts of an infectious agent, their body can mount an immediate immune response. Passive immunity is therefore different from a vaccine that might require weeks for the person to make their own antibodies against the virus.

These three antibodies represent a clever strategy against the virus. One of the antibodies binds up a form of Ebolavirus protein that seems to be sent off by the virus as a decoy against the immune response.