Monday, November 30, 2015

HEALTH - Fighting Ebola

"How to grow an Ebola vaccine with a tobacco plant" PBS NewsHour 11/23/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  What looks like an ordinary greenhouse is actually an around-the-clock Ebola vaccine factory.  At a facility in Kentucky, plants are being injected with a protein in order to spur them into producing one of the three antibodies used in the experimental drug ZMapp.  Special correspondent Mary Jo Brooks reports on how bio-pharming is helping to ramp up the speed of drug production to fight the disease.

MARY JO BROOKS (NewsHour):  It looks like an ordinary greenhouse filled with plants basking under light, but at this facility just outside Owensboro, Kentucky, the plants themselves have become a labor force, working around the clock to manufacture a cure for Ebola.

HUGH HAYDON, CEO, Kentucky Bioprocessing:  These plants are 27 days old.

MARY JO BROOKS:  Three days earlier, these plants were injected with a genetic blueprint for one of three antibodies used in the experimental drug ZMapp.

Hugh Haydon of Kentucky Bioprocessing explains how it works.

HUGH HAYDON:  The plant recognizes that gene and its machinery turns on and it starts to manufacture that protein for us.  And it’s really that simple.  It becomes a little bitty factory.

MARY JO BROOKS:  ZMapp was still in the developmental stage when Ebola first broke out in West Africa in March of 2014.  The disease has since claimed more than 10,000 victims.  But a handful of people were successfully tweeted with ZMapp, including Dr. Kent Brantly.

DR. KENT BRANTLY, Ebola Survivor:  Today is a miraculous day.  I am thrilled to be alive, to be well, and to be reunited with my family.

MARY JO BROOKS:  Since then, the drug has being undergoing clinical trials in West Africa and the FDA has granted it fast-track approval status.

Larry Zeitlin and Kevin Whaley are the scientists from San Diego (1) who developed the ZMapp antibodies, which were designed to quickly attack the Ebola virus.

(1) One for my hometown!

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