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Meet the Doctor Trying To Use the Blood of Ebola Survivors To Create a Cure

Posted by samzenpus on from the it's-in-the-blood dept.

An anonymous reader points out this article about Dr. James Crowe, who is trying to use the blood of Ebola survivors to develop a cure. "For months, Vanderbilt University researcher Dr. James Crowe has been desperately seeking access to the blood of U.S. Ebola survivors, hoping to extract the proteins that helped them overcome the deadly virus for use in new, potent drugs. His efforts finally paid off in mid-November with a donation from Dr. Rick Sacra, a University of Massachusetts physician who contracted Ebola while working in Liberia. The donation puts Crowe at the forefront of a new model for fighting the virus, now responsible for the worst known outbreak in West Africa that has killed nearly 7,000 people. Crowe is working with privately-held drugmaker Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc, which he said will manufacture the antibodies for further testing under a National Institutes of Health grant. Mapp is currently testing its own drug ZMapp, a cocktail of three antibodies that has shown promise in treating a handful of Ebola patients."

33 comments

  1. I don't think you understand... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Niggers are the disease and Ebola is the cure.

    1. Re:I don't think you understand... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

      Because of racist assholes like you, two innocent men had ti die.

    2. Re:I don't think you understand... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      As soon as I read the overview on the front page my immediate thought was that this thread was going to be filled with racist crap ranging from the outright troll baiting to the inevitable more subtle implicit stuff that will follow. Thank you for not disappointing me. I never thought I would get nostalgic for the good old days when slashdot was only mildly racist and mysogenistic.

    3. Re:I don't think you understand... by kwbauer · · Score: 1

      Look the AC is ridiculous but so is the assertion that a Black man killed an Asian and a Hispanic/Latino because some idiot on the internet used a racial epithet.

    4. Re:I don't think you understand... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Newton's Third Law : For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

      It is IMO also amazingly accurate outside of its intended scope.

    5. Re:I don't think you understand... by kwbauer · · Score: 1

      So I write "nigger" and another non-white cop dies? Or do I have to call you a nigger for the effect to happen? That is about the biggest stretch I have ever seen. If I use "whitey" does another non-Black cop shoot a black kid as well?

  2. Under an NIH grant? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So if the government's fronting the money and the treatment pans out, it should be publicly-owned.
    If Mapp is doing this to make money, let them risk their own capital instead of tax money.

    1. Re:Under an NIH grant? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The authors of the Bayh-Dole act disagree with you. You need to define what you mean by "should."

    2. Re:Under an NIH grant? by alexander_686 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Nope. This particular cure has a long history so it is well covered by prior art. This was done back in the 70s IIRC.

      The big difference is that never before have there been so many survivors or an Ebola epidemic that has run so long. Normally after a few weeks Ebola has burnt itself out. For the few handful of healthy survivors there is nobody left sick.

      This time it got to the cities, letting it propagate faster than the carries could die out. Then throw in good palliative care, which is new this time around. IIRC that ups the odds of surviving from 10% to 50%.

    3. Re:Under an NIH grant? by aBaldrich · · Score: 1

      I know that the Argentine Hemorragic Fever's first treatments before the development of the vaccine was transfusion of survivors' plasma.

      --
      In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
    4. Re:Under an NIH grant? by rs79 · · Score: 0

      It was discovered in 95 by an African doctor who just guessed and saved 7 out of 8 people;

      http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/...

      something wasn't right about this though.

      http://jvi.asm.org/content/75/...

      the who was skeptical and it's only been in the last few months when it's been approved, when it was used out of desperation that the protocol has gained any traction. there are billions at stake with an EBOV vaccine, just as there was in 1948 with the polio vaccine.

      "Klenner's paper (Klenner FR. The treatment of poliomyelitis and other virus diseases with vitamin C. J. South. Med. and Surg., 111:210-214, 1949.) on curing 60 cases of polio in the epidemic of 1948 should have changed the way infectious diseases were treated but it did not." - Robert Cathcart

      Now look at these three:

      http://en.ird.fr/the-media-cen...
      http://orthomolecular.org/libr...
      http://ajcn.nutrition.org/cont...

      There's a reason there's no HIV vaccine and it's the same reason there never will nor can be an EBOV vaccine - Coxsackie viruses are different and if you ignore their RNA encoding and subsequent biochemical expression you're gonna have a really bad day. The second paper above explains why they cannot work, see Keshen's disease in Wikipedia, it's the Coxsackie virus disease we figured this out from.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...

      There's no need to mess around with blood, honest and antibodies are not the reason it works - what do antibodies need to do their job - think!. Look at recent work in the field, Google (scholar) "selenium" with words like "hiv", "ebola", "cancer" and pay attention to the work of the last 4-5 years and especially THAT 1995 Zaire paper - the only time Pauling ever posted to the net. Thanks for the warning Linus, you clever clever boy. Now there was a Doctor.

      http://scarc.library.oregonsta...

      --
      Need Mercedes parts ?
  3. Stand back while he does real medicine by See+Attached · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This is awesome. Real medicine. Not treatment, not a profit motive. Just building on what protected one patient with the hope of helping others be rid of the disease. Go Dr Crowe, Go Mapp! We need less focus on monetization and more on misery.

    --
    Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
    1. Re:Stand back while he does real medicine by sjames · · Score: 1, Insightful

      I assure you, there is a profit motive to the development. The plasma donor is the one with no profit motive.

      It's still good to see an approach that has yielded success built upon.

    2. Re:Stand back while he does real medicine by alexander_686 · · Score: 2

      The donors are making about $80 per donation, which in a poor country is good money. And it is whole blood, not plasma.

    3. Re:Stand back while he does real medicine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      They didn't blind themselves, the monkeys died from euthanasia not ebola, and the clinical score protocol used to decide when euthanasia was required was not published. There is essentially no evidence allowing us to distinguish between whether the drug worked vs. the researchers being biased.

      "This study was not blinded"
      "Animals were scored daily for signs of disease, in addition to changes in food and water consumption"
      "the clinical limit for IACUC mandated euthanasia"
      http://go.nature.com/oY8pGI

    4. Re:Stand back while he does real medicine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I hope he won't allow misplaced political-correctness to cramp his research.
      It seems plausible that those with the Duffy negative blood type might be more susceptible to the virus.
      (This would include virtually all West Africans and about 68% of African-Americans.)

      Duffy -ve blood provides some resistance to Malaria, at the cost of heightened sensitivity to (e.g.) HIV.
      It does this by changing the "stickiness" of the surface of red blood cells: quite possibly a factor in haemorrhagic fevers.
      The primates that were thought to be the source of both Ebola and HIV have parallel (but I think unrelated) Malarial adaptations.

    5. Re:Stand back while he does real medicine by EuclideanSilence · · Score: 1

      There is always profit motive. Always. It's just myopic to define profit only in terms of currency.

      Getting a profit of medicinal development is still profit. Getting a profit of money is fine too. Pretending that this is being done without profit because you happen to like the form the profit takes is ridiculous.

    6. Re:Stand back while he does real medicine by See+Attached · · Score: 1

      Perhaps altruism is not the right word (... benefits another at its own expense...), perhaps the focus on better survival of society as we know it. It could have been much worse, not to diminish the awful toll already taken. Good point about profit. The growth in capability is still profit .... been distracted by the incessant justification by financial return. Now.. lets turn this around and look at superbugs before those get nastier yet. Lets characterize profit then as advancement in medical methods to target our adversaries and tune our adaptive immune systems to tolerate these nasty critters! How to motivate to that end, though...

      --
      Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
  4. ZMapp by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    I've watched way too many zombie movies to feel comfortable with the drug's name.

    1. Re:ZMapp by PapayaSF · · Score: 2

      I've watched way too many zombie movies to feel comfortable with the drug's name.

      Heck, never mind the name, this is the beginning of the plot of more zombie movies than I can count.

      --
      Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
    2. Re:ZMapp by Progman3K · · Score: 3, Informative

      I've watched way too many zombie movies to feel comfortable with the drug's name.

      Heck, never mind the name, this is the beginning of the plot of more zombie movies than I can count.

      You two aren't just whistlin' Dixie; that's the major plot of the Charlton Heston classic The Omega Man.

      Then again, that one chick-zombie was pretty cool, so if that's a possible side-effect, then I say it's win-win.

      --
      I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
    3. Re:ZMapp by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

      I watched "The Omega Man" and the two versions of "I Am Legend" (all were based on the "I Am Legend" novel by Richard Matheson). The best IMO is the one with Will Smith.
      Anyway, there are many others with similar plots; but that Z in the drug's name is just begging for shit to happen!
      Slightly off-topic comment: Z Nation 1st season ending... wtf???

    4. Re:ZMapp by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I really don't normally say this, but the book was better, maybe it helps that I read the book in the heat of the Ebola outbreak, but whereas I'm usually pretty forgiving of film adaptations, "I Am Legend" with Will Smith is only somewhat the same story. A great movie, a decent tribute to the book, but I don't feel it's the same story. Though having read the book gave me a greater appreciation for the movie.

  5. Jim Crow by tepples · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As soon as I read the overview on the front page my immediate thought was that this thread was going to be filled with racist crap

    Especially given the unfortunate coincidental baggage of this doctor's name. It sounds like Jim Crow, the nickname for the policy of systematic racial segregation in the southern United States during the first half of the twentieth century. (Outside the US, you might know it as "apartheid".) James Crowe was also the name of one of the six Confederate veterans who founded the Ku Klux Klan, the others being Richard Reed, John Lester, Frank McCord, Calvin Jones, and John Kennedy. And Ebola is often thought of as a "black" disease.

    1. Re:Jim Crow by Todd+Palin · · Score: 1

      Gee, that's really strange, because it never occurred to me that there was anything racist. And, really, there wasn't anything until your post.

    2. Re:Jim Crow by Todd+Palin · · Score: 2

      Oops, I guess I should occasionally read AC posts. I kind of get in the habit of ignoring ACs, and I forgot they existed.

  6. DRACULA! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Dracula has risen!!! YIPPEEEE!!

  7. Lets wait by ryen · · Score: 1

    Lets meet him when he actually finds a cure. That should be his motivation for media attention, not premature sensationalist profiles.

  8. Hats off to this guy. by Virtucon · · Score: 1

    It's nice to see somebody trying to do something without big pharma trying to rape us for billions in R&D for anything it seems nowadays.

    --
    Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
    1. Re:Hats off to this guy. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah - stick to "big pharma" and their vaccines and other proven treatments. Lets get more guys testing stuff that we don't know works yet!

    2. Re:Hats off to this guy. by EuclideanSilence · · Score: 1

      I'm pretty sure he was coming down on their artificial monopolies and subsidies. Treatments are worthless if you can't afford them, economics is a reality that morality cannot overcome.

  9. Meet the Doctor? by Johnny_Truant · · Score: 1

    Um, no thanks.

  10. Ebola Get Rich Quick Scheme! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Hey, just fly to Africa, get infected with Ebola, fly back to U.S., survive the treatment, then you can sell your blood for millions!
    Profit!!