text: A 2014 paper described how Mapp and its collaborators, including investigators at Public Health Agency of Canada, Kentucky BioProcessing, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, first chimerized the three antibodies comprising ZMAb, then tested combinations of MB-003 and the chimeric ZMAb antibodies in guinea pigs and then primates to determine the best combination, which turned out to be c13C6 from MB-003 and two chimeric mAbs from ZMAb, c2G4 and c4G7.  This is ZMapp.
  In an experiment also published in the 2014 paper, 21 rhesus macaque primates were infected with the Kikwit Congolese variant of EBOV.  Three primates in the control arm were given a non-functional antibody, and the 18 in the treatment arm were divided into three groups of six.  All primates in the treatment arm received three doses of ZMapp, spaced 3 days apart.  The first treatment group received its first dose on 3rd day after being infected; the second group on the 4th day after being infected, and the third group, on the 5th day after being infected.  All three primates in the control group died; all 18 primates in the treatment arm survived.  Mapp then went on to show that ZMapp inhibits replication of a Guinean strain of EBOV in cell cultures.
  Mapp remains involved in the production of the drug through its contracts with Kentucky BioProcessing, a subsidiary of Reynolds American.  To produce the drug, genes coding for the chimeric mAbs were inserted into viral vectors, and tobacco plants are infected with the viral vector encoding for the antibodies, using Agrobacterium cultures. Subsequently, antibodies are extracted and purified from the plants. Once the genes encoding the chimeric mAbs are in hand, the entire tobacco production cycle is believed to take a few months.  The development of these production methods was funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as part of its bio-defense efforts following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.