British Ebola virus patient William Pooley has been discharged from the hospital. What happened to him also happened to the American doctor released from an Atlanta hospital and cured of Ebola.
All three cases have one common element. All three Ebola patients had been treated with ZMapp.
Is ZMapp the answer to Ebola, the deadly virus that already killed thousands in West Africa?
ZMapp is a cocktail of engineered antibodies meant to boost the body’s defenses against the virus. ZMapp, made by California-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, is grown in tobacco plants and is meant to improve on an old-fashioned approach that uses transfusions of blood from people who have survived an infection.
ZMapp is an experimental biopharmaceutical drug comprising three humanized monoclonal antibodies under development as a treatment for Ebola virus disease. It was used to save eighteen monkeys who were given lethal doses of the Ebola virus. The drug was first tested in humans during the 2014 West Africa Ebola virus outbreak and was credited as helping save lives, but it has not been subjected to a randomized clinical trial to prove its safety or its efficacy.
