As the global effort to contain the Ebola outbreak continues, a leading American expert on the disease spoke to students at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute about the virus – and why it’s important to understand the disease on a basic, molecular level.
Dr. Erica Ollmann Saphire is a professor at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, who has been working on a national and global scale – collaborating with medical professionals to find ways to combat the simply-structured, seven-genome Ebola virus. Her work brought her to the Roanoke Valley – where she lectured students about how the virus works on a physical and molecular level, as well as a triple-antibody “cocktail” called Zmapp she helped develop. Though still in experimental stages, the drug has been used in a few patients so far.
“There are three different proteins that work in complimentary ways. And by giving somebody Zmapp, you’ve conferred immediate immunity – you’ve given them the antibodies they didn’t have to fight the virus, and to alert the immune system to come and destroy what’s left.”
Dr. Ollman-Saphire says she was in Roanoke to inform students about vaccine research – and that preparing localities for an outbreak on US soil isn’t worth panicking over – understanding what could happen on a molecular level is what is important.
“I don’t think we need to worry in the United States so much. The worry is that – because this outbreak is now over 3,000 people instead of 50 people, as it goes into more and more people, and lasts longer and longer and longer, it’s accumulating mutations. So we just want to protect against the “what if” it becomes more transmissible.”
She says there is good work happening at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute – and by speaking about Zmapp, she’s excited to provide insight on the efforts in developing a vaccination for the disease that is unprecedented in geographic scale.