Article here: the experimental Ebola treatment that was recently provided to two infected Americans is described as “top secret.” Why is it top secret? Or why was it, I guess? Is there some kind of national security issue involved, or was this just the NIH protecting confidential business information (since the treatment is being developed by a biotech corporation)?
I know it’s GQ but I would guess the treatment came from work having to do with Ebola as a bioweapon.
If you know how to prevent your troops/population from coming down with Ebola when they are exposed to it, then attacking the enemy with Ebola becomes a very convenient strategy. Even more so if you can then tweak it to make it airborne. You could conceivably knock out 90% of a population and then just move in to take over the wealth they left behind.
It’s the same reason we get so concerned when we find out that some lab somewhere is still maintaining small pox virus.
Looking through the news articles about the ZMapp treatment, all the references to ZMapp being “top secret” seem to trace back to the CNN article. There’s certainly a difference between “government top secret” and “promising new drug that a pharmaceutical company is not ready to talk about yet,” but it could simply be that the CNN reporter was trying to make the latter point in needlessly exciting prose.
In other words, they mean it’s proprietary. It’s a trade secret, not top secret.
Yep, this.
It’s experimental, and hasn’t gone through the usual battery of tests required to approve it to be given to humans. New reports indicate that there was a “waiver” of some sort signed by the associated parties. Oh, I bet it was a doozy too.
“This is just as likely to kill you as cure you. So far we have tested on monkeys. Press hard, you’re making three copies”*
CNN, Fox, etc. They all amp up their headlines and stories to get clicks. Fuck’em.
The article says exactly what the treatment is:
That’s a fairly standard treatment approach. Antiserum raised against some pathogen is used for exotic diseases where there is no other treatment, and also as a common antivenom. The proprietary bit is creating the monoclonal antibodies: rather than extracting all antibodies from an animal immunized with part of the pathogen, you extract the immune cell (singular!) that produces the best antibody, and grow them up in culture to produce large quantities of the antibody. Even though that general approach is practically the foundation for modern biotech, the particulars are proprietary or patentable.
I assumed the reference to it was less ‘top secret’ and more of a ‘non-FDA approved drug treatment’ meaning they don’t want anyone saying there is a cure for Ebola. It is almost surely a ‘trade secret’, but nothing more than that, and given that it is this or nothing, I’m sure the patients signed whatever waivers were necessary.
As a side question, there are people who have survived Ebola in the past. Has no one thought to get their antibodies for study and developed a treatment from that? Why the more elaborate multi-fragmented mouse approach?
It’s easy to extract antibodies from blood. However, what you get is a mix of antibodies that bind to every pathogen that the host organism has ever encountered. These are polyclonal antibodies. If the host has been recently infected or immunized with a pathogen, the immune system ramps up production of antibodies that recognize the particular antigen. As a very crude measure, you can take these antibodies and give them to a patient. Ideally, the antibodies will bind to the virus in ways that reduce infection and promote host defense. However this is a one-shot treatment – you can only get antibodies if you have a healthy donor that recently survived the pathogen.
Now why can’t we take antibodies from a patient, analyze them, and make copies? The short answer is that there are many, many antibodies that recognize your antigen of interest, but every single antibody is present in small quantities. The best available protein biochemistry methods require relatively large quantities of pure sample to identify the sequence of an unknown protein.
That’s why we use mouse monoclonal antibodies. Rather than taking the antibodies themselves, we take the immune cells that make each individual antibody. Each individual cell is isolated, and then stimulated to grow into a colony of identical cells that can produce larger quantities of antibody. Then, the colonies that make the right antibodies are identified with automated screening techniques. Ultimately you have to identify the one-in-a-million cell that makes the right antibody. The fastest way to do that is to isolate as many immune cells as possible from an animal that you know is producing some of the right antibodies (i.e. by isolating an entire mouse spleen).
Theoretically you might be able to do the same with humans, starting with small biopsies from lymph tissue. But each biopsy might only have a one-in-a-thousand chance of having the right immune cell, so the odds are against that approach.
There are protocols for production of human monoclonals. They don’t require biopsies, just reasonable volumes of fresh whole blood. I don’t know of anyone doing this for Ebola, but if be surprised if it isn’t happening in a lab somewhere.
Passive antibody transfer from recovered patients has been used in the past. The success rate is unimpressive and it’s unclear if the treatment is ever actually responsible for a recovery. After all, some folks do survive Ebola with no treatment.
Ah yes, the famous mémouse à trois.
It appears it was a military application.
The maker of the secret drug…
Mapp Biopharmaceutical has been working with the National Institutes of Health and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, an arm of the military responsible for weapons of mass destruction, to develop an Ebola treatment for several years.*
It’s also possible they don’t want to reveal the exact what and where, because that would probably lead to a lot of protestors picketing whatever entity actually produced the treatment, demanding that if Americans can get it, Africans should get it too, and it’s racism, etc. I remember some similar kinds of things happening when there were a lot of experimental AIDS medication trials going on in the 80s and early 90s.
I’m sure that the reason it’s not being widely administered is not only because it’s experimental, but also because should only be given, at this point, to people who can receive at the same time the palliative care, and sterile precautions they can get in a US hospital.
It’s not racism to say we owe something to our own citizens. Besides, I don’t even know what race the two Americans being treated are. They could be Nigerian-born and naturalized.
Cool, I did not know that.
For everyone else following along, here is such a protocol: Rapid generation of fully human monoclonal antibodies specific to a vaccinating antigen - PMC
Basically you either need to give someone an effective immunization, or you need to collect fresh blood from someone who had recently survived the pathogen of interest. Which is certainly possible but logistically tricky – you have to wait for an outbreak to get blood samples to work from. Thus it’s a hell of a lot easier to start work in the lab with mouse monoclonal antibodies, using techniques that have been refined over the last 40 years.
There’s a good accessible-but-thorough description of the science here: Bio-high-tech treatment for Ebola may have saved two US citizens - Ars Technica
This is a great theory except for the part where everyone knows the treatment was developed and produced by Mapp Biopharmaceutical.
The pharmaceutical company’s website does indeed say that they are in collaboration with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and the Public Health Agency of Canada. You always got to keep your eye on those Canadians…
I suspect there’s a lot of cloak and dagger stuff going on to prevent the various African nations where Ebola is common from just ignoring the patents and using it themselves, especially considering that Mapp Pharmaceuticals is so small, and they’re working with the government.
This makes sense- if someone were to weaponize Ebola, it would be good to have a treatment, or at least a promising line or research cooking. If you give away your research and serum, whoever brings the Ebola might find a way around it. Plus, if you wipe out the profit for Mapp, you not only kill their company, but you also put a serious dent in other smaller companies’ desire to work on stuff like this- they’re more likely to work on old lady wrinkle treatments than Ebola treatments if it means they won’t get stolen.
Sucks for the Africans, but that’s how thing work.
Just to be clear, the United States and 169 other countries are members of the Biological Weapons Convention, which forbids the possession or development of biological weapons.
One could infer from some of the posts in this thread that if the U.S. is shown to be developing vaccines or treatments to some virus or another, then it is possible evidence of a secret biological weapons program. This is specious reasoning because it would be a gross violation of a treaty the U.S. has been a member of for nearly half a century.
I meant by some terrorist organization or rogue state, not by the 169 Biological Weapons Convention signatories.
I can imagine that the military and Homeland Security fund all sorts of vaccine and disease treatment lines of research in a “just in case” kind of way. I don’t think we have any covert biological weapon programs, but that doesn’t mean other countries and organizations don’t.
It’s kind of like saying everyone in your neighborhood pledged to get rid of guns, so you don’t need one if someone breaks in. What if the breaker-in isn’t from your neighborhood?
Or one could infer that the US is planning for the possibility that Ebola becomes transmissible in an airborne way, either through natural mutation or someone else weaponizing Ebola. Ebola is frankly way too unpredictable to try to weaponize.