Necessary, Yes..but.. North Carolina & Texas working to produce EBOLA Drug ZMAPP [View all]

[misterhighwasted]

A Texas site is preparing to manufacture the experimental Ebola drug ZMapp, says Robin Robinson, director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), a division within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Robinson adds that Novartis’s (NYSE: NVS) vaccine facility in North Carolina is a possible second site to make the drug. Those sites were developed previously in partnership with a U.S. government effort to establish response centers capable of manufacturing drugs and vaccines in an emergency.

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ZMapp, developed by San Diego-based biotech Mapp Biopharmaceutical, is a biological drug. The antibodies that spark the immune system are produced in tobacco plants, then extracted from the plant to make the drug. A Kentucky subsidiary of Reynolds American grew the tobacco plants that made the monoclonal antibodies in ZMapp. Robinson says BARDA is now working with a response center at Texas A&M University to bring the tobacco drug-making technology from Kentucky to Texas

(snip)
“They would respond by making that product, then helping us through clinical trials, then taking it to where it’s needed,” Robinson says.

Robinson, who is also deputy assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS, was in North Carolina last week for a Novartis event marking the first shipments of seasonal flu vaccine from the company’s Holly Springs, NC, vaccine plant. He says new vaccine production technology that Novartis has implemented to make flu vaccines more quickly could also, if needed, be used to make biological drugs such as ZMapp.

http://www.xconomy.com/raleigh-durham/2014/09/30/zmapp-ebola-drug-production-set-for-texas-possibly-north-carolina/