As ebola spreads, big pharmaceutical companies are taking a back seat to smaller ones because a project to find a cure could be a money loser, experts told the HuffingtonPost.

Small biotech companies are more likely to be attracted to finding a cure or vaccine because of the lure of government funding, good PR and the chance to make an impact, said Thomas Geisbert, a professor at the University of Texas medical branch at Galveston, where a lab is researching possible treatments for ebola, HuffingtonPost reports.

Tekmira Pharmaceutical Corp., a publicly-traded company in Vancouver, Canada, has an ebola drug in the works that is further along in the trial process than ZMapp, the experimental drug used on the American ebola patients, CNN reports. TKM-Ebola has been tested in humans, according to CNN medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, reporting in a CNN video.

Treating a disease that affects relatively few people who typically don’t have much money doesn’t offer a great return on investment for profit-driven companies, experts told HuffingtonPost.

Exactly how much profit it would take to get big pharmaceutical companies interested in finding an ebola cure is unclear.

The number of ebola patients is small compared to the number of people suffering from
malaria and cancer. “Who are they going to sell it to?” Geisbert said. “You’re just talking a small number of cases.”

ZMapp, the experimental treatment given to the American patients, has only been tested on animals and isn’t approved by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Bloomberg reported. The drug helps the immune system fight the disease, and is the result of a collaboration between U.S. Army funding, Canadian public health research and small biotech firms — some with fewer than 10 employees.

Mapp Biopharmaceutical, a tiny San Diego company, came up with the chemical structure for the treatment, HuffingtonPost reports. And Kentucky BioProcessing, which was bought by tobacco giant Reynolds American earlier this year, produced the drug using tobacco plants.

Other companies are also working with government funding to develop a cure for the deadly disease, according to CNNMoney. The government typically gets involved in these efforts with national defense in mind, HuffingtonPost reports.

In Canada, TKM-Ebola was 100 percent effective in animal tests if given within an hour of the animal being exposed, CNN reports. In humans it performed really well, according to Gupta. The drug was on a full clinical hold because as doses were increased, humans started having side effects such as nausea. Now the drug’s hold status has been moved to a partial clinical hold. The company did the testing in conjunction with the Department of Defense, Gupta said. It received $140-million in funding to help develop this drug.

In the absence of a cure stockpile, a bioterrorist could possibly wreak havoc using ebola, smallpox or other diseases, said Jason Kolbert, head of health care equity research at the Maxim Group, an investment banking firm.

Geisbert said he isn’t sure if increased awareness of ebola will push Big Pharma to develop a cure, but he’s already seen a “flurry of activity” by the government trying to advance the development of treatments.

If the ZMapp treatment is successful, it could encourage bigger companies to invest more money in finding a cure, said Charles Arntzen, a professor of infectious disease at Arizona State University. Arntzen got government funding to research an ebola vaccine through the same grant that funded the scientists at Mapp Biopharmaceutical.

Arntzen said he’s pretty far along in his research — he’s reached the animal-testing stage — but hasn’t moved to clinical human trials to test side effects because he said he needs “the big money” from a larger company, HuffingtonPost reports.