BioCentury
ARTICLE | Targets & Mechanisms

Two-timing Ebola

A bispecific antibody capable of neutralizing all Ebolavirus species

September 29, 2016 7:00 AM UTC

With five different Ebola viruses lurking in Africa and no way of knowing which will cause the next epidemic, the goal is to find a single drug to block them all. Now, two bispecific antibodies created by a team at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine could not only solve the problem but provide a strategy generalizable to any virus with an intracellular target.

Einstein has recruited Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc. and Integrated BioTherapeutics Inc. to collaborate on the project. Mapp, which has the ZMapp cocktail in Phase I/II testing with Defyrus Inc., has agreed to help optimize the bispecifics and manufacture them for additional preclinical tests, and Integrated, which is testing several preclinical stage mAbs to treat Ebola or other filoviruses, is supplying one of the components. ...