Yes! Another Ebola thread (with a twist)

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In this case, however, both people were apparently given an experimental treatment developed in part by a company called Mapp Biopharmaceutical. Complicating matters, Mapp licenses its developments to a company called LeafBio for production and distribution. But LeafBio has also licensed an Ebola treatment from a second company, called Defyrus, and it plans on combining the two. It's unclear whether the Americans received the original or combined therapy. In either case, both therapies were based on the same developmental process outlined below.

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The problem at this point was that the antibodies were from mice. If injected into humans, the human immune system would recognize the antibodies as foreign and start an immune response against the treatment. So Mapp cloned the genes for these antibodies and then swapped out parts, replacing parts of the mouse version with the human portion of the same gene and carefully avoiding alterations in the parts that recognize the Ebola protein.

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If the process described above—with infinite antibodies, cloning, mixing genes from different species, and mass production in plant cells—sounds like science fiction, it shouldn't. Every single one of those procedures is well established and has probably been used by a hundred biotech startups by now. Biotech doesn't tend to get the same attention as the work done by the people who make our processors and batteries, but it's some of the most amazing technology on the planet.

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