Possible cure for Ebola

ZMapp is a treatment that has never been tested on humans until two US aid workers were infected with the Ebola virus in Liberia. It is reported that they are improving after they were given the treatment. Though this treatment proved to have positive results when tested on non human primates, it is not certain that it has caused the improvement in those affected. ZMapp is actually not a synthetic drug but an antibody therapy that subsists of a cocktail of three different antibodies to the Ebola Virus. It’s also made with plants. Kentucky BioProcessing (KBP) is growing thousands of tobacco plants in a massive greenhouses in Owensboro, Kentucky. Bioreactor is the name of these plants and they are being used to make a variety of proteins for pharmaceutical products.

Vaccines and antibodies that are against certain disease causing organisms are an example. Health threats like the flu, rabies, HIV and HPV are some of the issues KBP had to produce therapeutic proteins for. A gene that encodes are certain antibody is inserted into the plant virus. The virus then infects the tobacco plant and infected cells start to make the proteins which are eventually removed and purified into a serum. The production of various therapeutic proteins are benefitting from Bioreactor plants because they’re faster and more active, as well as more cheaper to use than traditional methods. Scaling-up production is easy because tobacco plants grow quickly.

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