Antibody Engineering for Pursuing a Healthier Future

Saeed, Abdullah F. U. H.; Wang, Rongzhi; Ling, Sumei; Wang, Shihua

Ebola virus disease (EVD) is a severe, often fatal, zoonotic infection documented with most recent widespread outbreak in west Africa. It is caused by a virus of the Filoviridae family (genus Ebolavirus). The disease is transmitted from human to human via contact with body fluids of the patients, the incubation period is 1-21 days and case fatality rates range from 30 to 90% (Beeching et al., 2014) . A mAb named ZMapp is manufactured in the tobacco plant Nicotiana benthamiana to treat EVD patients and to improve public health. It contains a cocktail of different mAbs (MB-003, ZMab, c2G4, and c4G7) that work to avert the spread of the disease within the body (Qiu et al., 2014) . A recent study investigated the treatment of EVD patient with ZMapp, a buffy coat transfusion from an Ebola survivor, and the broad-spectrum antiviral GS-5734. The patient is a first neonate documented to have successfully survived EVD (Dörnemann et al., 2017) .