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The Ebola Epidemic Crystallizes the Potential of Passive Antibody Therapy for Infectious Diseases

Year: 2015

Type: article

Abstract: The current Ebola epidemic provides a dramatic example of the potential of passive antibody therapy for infectious diseases that is also instructive of the hurdles and limitations involved in wide-scale reintroduction of this powerful anti-infective strategy. Passive antibody therapy was first used in the 1890s as "serum therapy " and was the first effective anti-infective therapy. Serum therapy was largely discontinued with the advent of antibiotic therapy in the early 1940s because it could not compete with regards to cost or ease of administration and had additional complexities, including that it had to be administered early in disease, it manifested lot-to-lot variation, and its efficacy required immune donors and the availability of a specific microbio-logical diagnosis so sera could be matched to the disease-causing microorganism [1]. Serum therapy using heterologous sera was also associated with "serum sickness, " a syndrome caused by the formation of antigen-antibody complexes. However, antibiotic therapy was never shown to be superior in efficacy to antibody therapy and there were some conditions, such as pneumo-coccal pneumonia, where it may have had some advantages. Despite their wholesale abandon-ment, antibody therapies did retain a niche for certain conditions where no drugs were available, such as the prevention and/or treatment of tetanus, botulism, and certain viral dis-

Source: PLoS Pathogens

DOI: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1004717

Authors: Arturo Casadevall, Liise-anne Pirofski

Institutions: Johns Hopkins University, Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Language: English

Topic: Viral Infections and Outbreaks Research

Subfield: Infectious Diseases

Field: Medicine

Domain: Health Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $3,043