Plant Molecular Farming

The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Hokkaidō, has developed a state-of-the-art plant factory that is the first in the world equipped to cultivate transgenic plants and convert them into drugs, all on the same premises.

"Here is what I said about the ebola antibody system on Arizona TV last night.   I hope you approve!"

Plans for a new £5m molecular farming facility furthering ground-breaking technologies invented at the John Innes Centre in Norwich were announced on 23rd July 2014. The announcement was made by Professor Jackie Hunter, BBSRC Chief Executive, at an event marking the opening of the landmark new Centrum building on the Norwich Research Park.

The new facility will use a technology invented by Professor George Lomonossoff and Dr Frank Sainsbury, BBSRC Innovators of the Year in 2012, and will establish Norwich as a leading international centre for research and development in the use of plants to produce high value compounds.

The technology is already in use in Canada, where pharmaceutical company Medicago has a greenhouse of plants on permanent readiness to be able to produce vast quantities of vaccine in the event of a pandemic flu - the technology has meant it is possible to now produce 10m doses of a vaccine in 30 days compared with 9 months using traditional methods. 

The announcement formed part of the official opening of the Centrum building on the Norwich Research Park, by the Minister for Life Sciences George Freeman. Mr Freeman also launched the Norwich Research Park’s Virtual Technology Centre – a website which enables ease of access for academics and businesses, to the wealth of scientific technology platforms at the John Innes Centre and other institutes across the Norwich Research Park

The “secret serum” being used to treat the two Americans infected with Ebola virus is a three-monoclonal-antibody experimental cocktail provided by Mapp Biopharmaceutical.

ZMapp is made of three monoclonal antibodies, disease fighting proteins that target a specific part of an invading pathogen, in this case the Ebola Zaire virus. That is the specific strain of Ebola responsible for this outbreak.

Two of the monoclonal antibodies are the product of years of research done at the Public Health Agency of Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, the agency confirmed in an email late Monday.

The drug is generated in tobacco plants that have been genetically engineered to produce the monoclonal antibodies. That work is done by Kentucky BioProcessing of Owensboro, KY., a subsidiary of tobacco giant Reynolds American.

A spokesman for Reynolds said within the last week Kentucky BioProcessing was asked by Emory University Hospital and Samaritan's Purse to provide a limited amount of ZMapp to be used to treat Brantly and Writebol. David Howard said the makers were given an IND — investigational new drug — designation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Supplies are limited, and deciding who gets treatment is difficult

Even as the Ebola crisis rages onward inwest Africa, a World Health Organization panel concluded on August 11 that offering patients promising experimental Ebola drugs with unknown side effects andefficacy would be ethical.
 
The 12-member panel from the United Nations agency left aside questions about who should get the limited drugs and how that should be decided until it meets again at the end of the month. WHO says the difference between this outbreak and the circumstances in prior episodes is the sheer scale of the affected areas, which rendered traditional public health approaches to containing Ebola inadequate.

An experimental medicine that has been called a “secret serum” is being given to two Americans infected with Ebola.

How and why Dr. Brantly and Ms. Writebol received the drug, ZMapp, is one of the many mysteries surrounding what has been called a “secret serum,” including the big one: Does it really work? The Americans are the only two patients who have been treated with the medicine, out of perhaps thousands who might have benefited so far, raising old questions about who does — and does not — have access to medications, including experimental drugs.  But the San Diego-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, the primary developer of the drug, was consumed Wednesday with how to manufacture more of it with an eye to providing the drug to more patients, probably in the form of clinical trials.