From SeattleTimes. Story by New York Times writer Sheri Fink.

After an Italian nurse who contracted Ebola in Sierra Leone was discharged Wednesday from a Rome hospital, a doctor there described the experimental treatments the patient had received as “absolutely miraculous.”

They included MIL77, a product from China that was also given to a British army nurse who recovered from Ebola at a London hospital in March. It is a near copy of what many believed was the most promising Ebola therapy: a cocktail of antibodies known as ZMapp, the result of a collaboration between the U.S. and Canada.

While a limited supply of ZMapp was quickly exhausted, a small private Chinese company, Beijing Mabworks, raced ahead last fall, helping to produce about 100 doses of MIL77. That means more potentially lifesaving treatments for desperate patients.

But it has also led to patent-infringement concerns by U.S. officials, and to disagreements over when experimental Ebola therapies should be offered to patients only in carefully controlled studies and when they should be made more available for compassionate reasons.

Feng Li, chief executive of Beijing Mabworks, said his company was motivated to fight a global emergency and had made a licensing agreement with ZMapp’s intellectual-property-rights holder.

“People think international collaboration could easily happen between the U.S. and Canada,” he said, “but these days, China could play a role” by making emergency-response drugs “better and faster in some cases.”

ZMapp is being tested in a clinical trial in the U.S. and Sierra Leone, where the government reported nine new cases of Ebola on Thursday, one of the highest daily totals in months.

…Within three months, using information in ZMapp’s patent, Li and his colleagues had copied the active part of ZMapp and used the company’s specialized cells to produce the antibodies. A month later, with the help of the Chinese pharmaceutical company Hisun, they had 100 doses.

Some U.S. officials expressed concern. The U.S. government holds a patent on one of the antibodies in ZMapp, which was developed with support from U.S. and Canadian military research agencies, a legacy of fears that Ebola could be used as a biological weapon by the Soviet Union or, later, by terrorists.

Read more at SeattleTimes.