Of note, the latter strategy of bringing a mobile laboratory to the patient has helped enormously in the rapid field diagnosis and isolation of patients with suspected Ebola virus. virus. These researchers are a different breed from the caricature of the typical scientist: a bespectacled, studious person in a white coat, manipulating tubes filled with unknown chemicals or injecting mice in the laboratory. It is also a tribute to the governments that built these very expensive research facilities. These governments provided sustained, long-term funding over many years, without any certain outcome, for a rare infection that occurs in faraway lands, among some of the poorest nations in Africa. Of special note for Canadians is the extensive involvement of Canadian biotechechnology companies, particularly with the development and advance of Ebola vaccines and therapeutics for eventual human use. Although serum therapy was used frequently in the pre-antibiotic era against a variety of pathogens,1,2 the consequences of its use against Ebola infections are potentially far-reaching. These candidate countermeasures in the pipeline against Ebola, and perhaps other viral hemorrhagic fevers, appear promising. The humanCmouse chimeric monoclonal antibody cocktail used in Liberia is one of a growing number of Ebola countermeasures and was developed by collaborators in the Public Health Agency of Canada, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute Dorzolamide HCL of Infectious Diseases, the Toronto-based company Defyrus Inc. and the San DiegoCbased company Mapp Biopharmaceutical. In addition, two candidate vaccines developed by the National Institutes of Health and the National Microbiology Laboratory are being pushed toward imminent phase I trials. These are the chimpanzee adenovirus and vesicular stomatitis virus gene delivery systems (Vaccine Research Center, National Institutes of Health: unpublished data, 2014).3,4 Combinations of biologic agents, such as monoclonal antibodies,5 are about to enter phase I clinical trials within the next few months. Custom-designed small interfering RNA, a product of PTGIS the Vancouver-based company Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corporation, has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for accelerated clinical development. Funding and regulatory agencies are moving quickly to fast-track the above products through clinical trials, as well as other promising countermeasures against Ebola. Novel methods of protein production (e.g., monoclonal antibodies) in tobacco plants are being pursued6 and offer a means for the rapid, economical and large-scale production of a desired protein. The administration of Ebola antibodies in humans raises some difficult and thorny ethical issues. When there are only two doses available and thousands are in need, who gets the treatment? Two volunteer health care workers who put their lives on the line to help Liberians during an uncontrolled, unprecedented outbreak, or two of the hundreds of Africans who might benefit from an experimental, nonapproved treatment? In this situation, two Americans received the treatment and may have been saved by it. These situations in which demand far exceeds supply are frequent during the early development of vaccines and therapeutics. The Americans ultimately received the antibodies because of access: access to the networks that could obtain the treatment, access to the treatment itself and access to rapid and tailored transportation. If the two Americans had not received the drug, then who should have? It could have been Dorzolamide HCL administered to two infected Liberians selected through lottery or some other perceived or accepted equitable means. How would you handle this in the context of an extreme shortage of Dorzolamide HCL treatment? Another side of this issue is the compassionate use of an experimental treatment in humans. The antibody cocktail used in the two Americans had not been through a full regulatory evaluation for safety and efficacy. Although partially mitigated by the safe use of serum therapy in the past, as well as the good safety records of monoclonal antibodyCbased treatments against a variety of human conditions and ailments,7 the risk of plant-made monoclonals in human recipients is unknown. The adverse effects could have been severe, even deadly. If the antibodies were used on two Africans and.