这是Financial Times 的文章。不是城楼上的8卦哈。
China sends thousands of doses of anti-Ebola drug to Africa
©Reuters
China is keen to cement its relationship with African countries by producing a drug to treat Ebola
China has sent thousands of doses of an experimental anti-Ebola drug developed by the Chinese military to Africa. The company manufacturing the drug said it plans to start human clinical trials there soon.
Sihuan Pharmaceutical, the private Chinese company that last week purchased the rights to commercialise jk-05 from a branch of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), said it began manufacturing the drug after it was approved in August as a “special drug for military needs”.
The Chinese military has already sent enough of the drug to treat 10,000 people to west Africa, according to Dr Huo Caixia, associate president of research and development for Sihuan and head of its Beijing Aohe Drug Research Institute. Sihuan, whose founders are former military doctors, is part-owned by Morgan Stanley private equity funds.
The aim is to have the drug on hand in case any of the Chinese medical personnel sent to help out with the Ebola epidemic fall ill and for use in clinical trials which are now being designed, she said. It had not yet been used to treat any African patients, she said, but added that could not be ruled out.
Eager to cement its relationship with African countries that may be affected by the virus, China is stepping up its contributions to the fight against Ebola.
Beijing has sent 200 medical workers to the affected countries and pledged more than $35m in medical aid to Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and the World Health Organisation. China told a World Bank crisis meeting in Washington last week its Ebola effort was already worth $200m altogether and would grow further.
China’s Academy of Military Medical Science, which according to its website was set up in 1951 by Mao Zedong to help China counter germ warfare waged by the US in North Korea, declined to comment on jk-05.
The large amount of the drug already present in Africa puts it on a scale with GlaxoSmithKline’s plans, announced in August, to manufacture 10,000 doses of an experimental Ebola vaccine being developed with the US National Institutes of Health. Human trials are under way in the US, UK and Mali to prove its safety.
The Chinese drug is being developed to treat Ebola and is not a vaccine. But it also has preventive uses, according to Dr Huo. She said it had passed cell and animal tests, but not human testing. Clinical trials would initially be done in Africa, she said, since no Chinese patients have yet contracted the disease.
Sihuan has released little technical information about jk-05, beyond saying that it “can selectively inhibit virus replication by inhibiting the RNA polymerase of the Ebola virus”. That means it blocks a key enzyme that the virus needs to replicate its genes.
A “small molecule” drug, jk-05 is a relatively simple chemical. This should make it possible to scale up production more quickly and less expensively than some of the other experimental drugs being fast-tracked for development in North America and Europe, which are biological products.
For instance the much discussed ZMapp from California-based Mapp Pharmaceutical, which was used to treat several US and European aid workers before supplies ran out, is a cocktail of three antibodies against the Ebola virus, produced from genetically engineered tobacco plants grown at a plant owned by Reynolds American in Kentucky.
The current level of approval for jk-05, issued by the Chinese military, would be sufficient for it to be used to treat military patients domestically, Dr Huo said, but she added: “If an Ebola outbreak happens in China, for sure it could be used not only for military patients but also for normal patients.”
She believes the drug could achieve full approval within months if an epidemic was looming.
