Mahidol's Ebola treatment to be patented shortly

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This is NOT a vaccine, it is an antibody, and as a "treatment" has never been shown to have any clinical effectiveness whatsoever.

A vaccine causes the body to make antibodies, it is not an antibody itself. Vaccines pre-expose you to the disease pathogen in an inactive form, and cause you to make antibodies that immunise you against the disease, that is prevent you getting it, if you are exposed to it in the future.

An antibody is a treatment that you use on someone who has already caught the disease : it will bind to the pathogen and help the body kill and eliminate it.

The Thai agent that is being patented is a humanised monoclonal antibody to part of the Ebola virus synthesised in a lab. All it does is bind to this bit of the Ebola virus. While a handy tool, there is no indication at all that it can ever be used as a treatment, because it has never been tested. Plenty of antibodies bind to their targets in the lab but do not work as "cures" when injected into human beings.

The ZMapp drug is a mixture of three antibodies made exactly like the Thai one, except developed many years before the Thais developed their single one. Because any single monoclonal antibody which recognises only a single small part of the Ebola virus is unlikely to be very effective alone, the Zmapp deveolpers used a mixture. The body's normal immune response is to make a set of antibodies to different parts of any pathogen so ZMapp mimics the body's immune response more effectively.

They are at least ten years ahead of the Thai group which has merely developed one antibody of unproven clinical effectiveness.

Sort of like a lot of things around here.