Avid Bioservices Inc (CDMO)

[Shavasana]

Cyril Empig, Ph.D., associate research director at Peregrine Pharmaceuticals. "With the increased focus on Ebola, there is an opportunity to take advantage of the specificity of bavituximab for Ebola virus and develop therapeutics or treatment regimens that could neutralize the virus. In addition, recently reported genomic sequence variations in EBOV suggest that drugs targeting specific viral non-variant proteins or protein sequences are at risk of failure as a result of virus escape mutations.4 We believe that there are advantages to utilizing bavituximab in a treatment regimen against Ebola virus given its great specificity for Ebola virions and Ebola-infected cells, its potential to circumvent the problem of virus escape mutations given that it is targeting a host molecule rather than a virus protein or protein sequence, and the possible role of PS in immunosuppression during Ebola infection.1 Given these data, we are developing a plan to explore potential applications of bavituximab and PS-targeting antibodies in the treatment of Ebola."