Ebola virus vaccine: Sign of bigger things to come

The virus that was discovered in the late 70s in the Belgian Congo has now struck fear and panic in West Africa. The therapy that is widely believed to cure the patient infected with Ebola virus is plantibody: Essentially, the gene encoding the antibody is genetically expressed as a protein in the humble tobacco plant. Several companies are working on producing recombinant proteins in Plants-PlantForm in Canada and the now famous Zapp biotech company in the US.

Ebola is a scary pathogen because mortality is rapid and almost certain. Ebola, curiously, also uses Tim-3 on cells to enter and cause pathogenicity. Interestingly, Tim-3 is highly expressed in T cells that are exhausted in HIV-1 disease. Does this mean that HIV-1 patients who express higher levels of Tim-3 have a higher chance of getting infected with Ebola. Now that is scary indeed!

Whether the cell types that express Tim-3 are infected by HIV-1 needs to be investigated!

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