A Chinese Ebola Drug Raises Hopes, and Rancor

NEW YORK TIMES   by Sheri Fink, MD                                                      June 12, 2015   

After a nurse who contracted Ebola in Sierra Leone was discharged Wednesday from a Rome hospital, a doctor there described the experimental treatments the patient had received as “absolutely miraculous.”

The lab at Beijing Mabworks, which developed the experimental drug, MIL77, used to treat Ebola. Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times

They included MIL77, a product from China that was also given to a British Army nurse who recovered from Ebola at a London hospital in March. It is a near copy of what many believed was the most promising Ebola therapy: a cocktail of antibodies known as ZMapp, the result of a collaboration between the United States and Canada.

While a limited supply of ZMapp was quickly exhausted, a small private Chinese company, Beijing Mabworks, raced ahead last fall, helping to produce about 100 doses of MIL77. That means more potentially lifesaving treatments for desperate patients.

 But it has also led to patent infringement concerns by American officials, and to disagreements over when experimental Ebola therapies should be offered to patients only in carefully controlled studies and when they should be made more available for compassionate reasons.
Read complete story.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/world/chinese-ebola-drug-brings-american-objections.html?_r=0