Gates Package — page 1011

works largely with generic manufacturers estimated that they will eventually help 200 million people get drugs to treat malaria who wouldn't have otherwise.18 I wish that making antibodies were as straightforward as making drugs. To produce antibodies for the hypothetical pathogen we're trying to contain, we'll need to find patients who've survived the disease, draw their blood, and identify the antibodies that their bodies developed to fight this particular disease. Since their blood will contain antibodies for essentially every disease they've ever encountered, we'll have to isolate the one we're looking for by introducing the virus to a bit of their blood, and then watching to see which antibodies stick to the virus. Those are the ones we want. (An alternative is to do the same process but with blood from humanized mice--rodents in which human cells or tissues have been implanted.) Once we've isolated the right antibody, we'll need to copy it billions of times over. We'll likely do that by growing them on the CHO cell platform, which consists, as you surely guessed, of ovarian cells from Chinese hamsters. These cells are so useful because they're especially hardy, they can be maintained indefinitely, and they grow quickly. The story of how they came to hold this lofty position has more twists and turns than I have space for in this book. According to one history of CHOs, most of the cells in use around the world today are clones of a cell line created by a geneticist at the University of Colorado Medical School in 1957. He had managed to get his hands on a single female whose ancestors had been smuggled out of China in 1948, on one of the last flights out of Shanghai before the Communist Party came to power. Unfortunately, the CHO platform doesn't produce antibodies fast enough to meet much of the need during a pandemic. The world produces around 6 billion doses of vaccines every