Chapter 159: Ebola (2)

The last Ebola outbreak in West Africa was only five years ago. But in the meantime, two of the four subjects died. It wasn’t because of Ebola, and it definitely wasn’t because the International Vaccine Institute harvested their blood serum. They just died because they were old. As such, Jason, the director general, was only able to reach two people when he called his subordinates after his meeting with Young-Joon. One of them also refused to donate blood.

—I tried to convince them, but they were firm in their decision, saying that they weren’t going to do it anymore. I gave up because I couldn’t force them.

Jason, who called Young-Joon, said with a sigh.

—We need at least five liters of blood to get enough blood serum. We failed last time with twenty liters.

“How much blood do you draw at once?”

—About fifty milliliters is standard for vaccine development research purposes. But in previous experiments, we got around five hundred milliliters like a standard blood donation.

Jason said.

—But even if we do that every month, it would take at least ten months, since we only have one subject now.

“That will take too long.”

Young-Joon frowned.

—Right.

Jason replied.

If Jason was doing this alone, he would have waited ten months to draw all the blood, as Ebola wasn’t spreading that badly since the outbreak in 2014. He wondered why Michelle asked Young-Joon to study Ebola all of a sudden, but there hadn’t been an outbreak reported to the World Health Organization yet.

However, Jason knew that Young-Joon wouldn’t wait that long. Young-Joon had been hunting down and crushing diseases as they came for the past year; he would die of frustration if he had to wait ten months just to get blood serum.

—And there’s another problem.

Jason said.

“Another one?”

—We can’t draw a lot of blood at once because the last subject isn’t very healthy.

“...”

—Honestly, if they weren’t the only subject remaining, we would advise them not to donate any blood.

“If they are so unwell, why are they trying to donate blood? For money?”

Paying people to donate specimens was a sensitive topic in research ethics. It was an incentive to get subjects to participate, but it became problematic if it was a large amount of money.

Of course, it depended on the situation. A large sum of money was acceptable since the International Vaccine Institute was a non-profit international welfare organization and there was a very small number of people who have naturally recovered from Ebola. The institute was offering five hundred thousand won for each blood donation. Considering that the Red Cross usually gave out a movie ticket in exchange for blood donations, it was quite a large amount. However, it was about the money.

—It’s because of the schizophrenia clinical trial.

Jason said.

* * *

The subject was a ninety-one-year-old grandpa, and his name was Pi Mak-Su. He was very frail, being only one hundred fifty nine centimeters tall and weighing forty-four kilograms. Normally, he couldn’t donate blood at the Red Cross even if he wanted to. Additionally, he had a lot of geriatric diseases, and he walked very slowly due to a significant decrease in muscle mass. Pi Mak-Su himself knew very well that his health was in bad condition. As such, he was going to refuse when the International Vaccine Institute asked him, but he changed his mind when he heard that the person in charge had changed to Young-Joon.

“My grandson had schizophrenia,” Pi Mak-Su said when he finally met Young-Joon.

“Was he in the clinical trial?” Young-Joon asked as Pi Mak-Su said his grandson

had

schizophrenia.

However, he shook his head.

“No.”

“Oh... Then is he still suffering from the illness?”

“No. He’s dead.”

“...”

Pi Mak-Su smiled bitterly.

“You’ve helped me out a bit, Doctor Ryu. I have insurance from A-Gen Life, I’m using the diagnostic kits, and my diabetes has gotten much better since I’ve been taking Amuc.”

“I see.”

“But my grandson wasn’t so lucky. He killed himself before you developed a cure.”

“...”

“Doctor Ryu, I’m an uneducated old man who doesn’t know anything about science or medicine. But I think that it’s up to you whether people live or die.”

“...”

“I will do anything I can do to help you do your job, Doctor Ryu. You can take all the blood in my body.”

“Thank you,” Young-Joon said. “But I will only take a small amount.”

After the meeting with Pi Mak-Su, Young-Joon went to see the medical staff at the International Vaccine Institute.

“Please draw ten milliliters of blood,” Young-Joon asked.

It was an embarrassingly small amount of blood. The needle was inserted into Pi Mak-Su’s arm. After a few drops of blood went into the plastic bag, the nurse snapped the lock.

“That’s it.”

Pi Mak-Su looked around in confusion as he heard the nurse.

“What do you mean?”

“We’re done with the blood draw, sir. Thank you. You can leave now.”

The blood in the plastic bag was transferred into a sterile test tube the size of a finger. It was delivered to A-Bio the next day by a specimen transportation company. It was safe for Pi Mak-Su, but it was a very small amount to use for experiments.

“Ten milliliters?”

Jason was baffled when he heard Young-Joon.

“Doctor Ryu, I think we will fail if we do that. He might pass away before we fill the required amount.”

“We won’t need additional donations,” Young-Joon said.

“We won’t?”

“We’ll do it with ten milliliters.”

“What?”

Jason thought he had misheard Young-Joon.

“We can’t get antibodies from that. There is a very little amount of antibodies in the blood. We have to purify the antibodies from a large volume of blood to get analyzable amounts,” Jason said like it was a shame.

“No. There are enough antibodies in the blood. The problem is the purification efficiency.”

“Pardon?”

“Purifying ten percent of the antibodies in one liter of blood is the same thing as purifying one hundred percent of the antibodies in one hundred milliliters.”

“... Still, can you increase the purification efficiency like that overnight?”

“I will try, Young-Joon said.

Young-Joon returned to the lab after talking to Jason. However, he didn’t have time to do the experiment himself because Michelle requested an urgent meeting with him.

—We need an emergency meeting regarding an Ebola outbreak. I will schedule it for the earliest date you can fly to Congo.

Young-Joon decided to leave the antibody purification to his employees. They could not fail because there was only ten milliliters of this important sample. Even if they went with the route Rosaline suggested, they had to do it right the first time because they didn’t have enough to do several experiments.

Young-Joon looked for a trustworthy person at the lab that could carry out the experiment precisely.

‘Most of the purification experts in the company can’t afford to take on a new project.’

However, there was one team that was on a break after succeeding in creating a lung organoid. It was the Life Creation Team that was focused on organoids and artificial organs.

Of course, they weren’t a department focused on purification even when they were at A-Gen.

‘But it was a place of exile for a lot of people from different departments.’

Jung Hae-Rim was at the Protein Purification Team before being banished to the Life Creation Department, and she was quite skilled in that field.

“Hae-Rim-ssi.”

Young-Joon gathered the Life Creation Team and called Jung Hae-Rim. Now, there was only one problem left. It was that they would have to use the lab at A-Gen because the equipment at A-Bio was already being used.

“Hae-Rim-ssi, would you be open to working with the Protein Purification Research Department at Lab Three?” Young-Joon asked.

As expected, Jung Hae-Rim’s expression immediately turned sour.

“I will do it if you order me to. But if you’re asking me how I feel about it, I really don’t like those people...”

“What kind of people are they?”

Young-Joon knew that she probably didn’t leave on good terms, but it was far worse than he imagined. Jung Hae-Rim left the Protein Purification Research Department after fighting with the executive manager, who kept touching and covertly sexually harassing her. At first, it was under the pretense of teaching her how to do experiments. It began with him hugging her from behind and groping her hands. When the executive manager realized that she liked to drink, he kept doing company dinners and making her sit beside him. However, people who liked to drink only liked it if they were drinking with people they liked. Jung Hae-Rim tried to get out of his sight, but it wasn’t easy. No one in the department helped her.

Rather, a strange rumor began going around at some point. It was that Jung Hae-Rim was drinking and flirting with the executive manager to get a promotion. When she first heard it, it was so unbelievable that she didn’t believe her ears. It didn’t take her long to find the origin of that rumor. It was one of her colleagues who joined the company with her; it was someone from another team who had asked her out. He was spreading the rumor out of spite.

When people get backed up into a corner and get extremely stressed, they tended to snap, especially if they were someone like Jung Hae-Rim, who had a hot temper.

She didn’t just internally report her executive manager, who kept touching her butt; she reported him to the police for sexual harassment. But the result? The charges were dismissed due to the consistent statements from all the employees. The executive manager was suspended for a week for causing trouble, and Jung Hae-Rim was suspended for one month and transferred to the Life Creation Department.

“I still get so angry when I think about it that I can feel my head get hot,” Jung Hae-Rim said. “Our executive manager was a guy named Song Pan-Sup, and he was one of the leading experts in the world on the development of protein purification methods.”

Even the lab director tended to give into his demands because that department had some of the best technicians in the world.

“That’s why I sleep facing away from Lab Three,” Jung Hae-Rim said.

“I see,” Young-Joon replied.

“But what will I be doing?” Jung Hae-Rim asked.

“Purifying the antibodies for Ebola.”

Jung Hae-Rim’s eyes widened.

“Making a standard blood serum? We did that a few years ago at the department. The International Vaccine Institute came to us after failing to purify the antibodies a few times. But we couldn’t do it either,” she said. “I was the one who actually did that. From my experience, hm... It might be possible if we have around fifty liters of blood.”

“We’re going to do it with ten milliliters.”

“Kek!” Jung Hae-Rim coughed. “Ten milliliters? Sir? Ten milliliters? Can you even get something from that?”

“It’s a little strange, but it’s possible,” Young-Joon said.

“The reason that purification efficiency is so low is because the antibodies keep making aggregated structures that are more than tetramers. The amino acid sequence also gets very messy with a lot of helix repeats.”

“How messy?”

“There are twenty helices in a row, and when you predict them through simulation, they are all tangled up.”

“...”

Jung Hae-Rim looked frustrated. How were they going to produce enough antibodies to use in vaccine development with only ten milliliters?

Young-Joon said, “The yield will be less than 0.001% with conventional methods. We would have to get ten kilograms of blood to get 0.1 grams of antibodies. But we need them in bulk.”

“Hm...”

Developing a purification method was also research. It took hundreds of trials and errors to find the right answer. And the biomaterial that Young-Joon explained to Jung Hae-Rim wasn’t going to be possible with hundreds of experiments. It was so difficult that it would take Song Pan-Sup, the head of the Protein Purification Research Department, thousands of attempts to even have a chance at succeeding.

“If it’s that complex, I honestly don’t think I can do it...” Jung Hae-Rim said without confidence.

“No, I know how to do it. You just have to follow the instructions. But it will be a handful,” Young-Joon said.

“Really?”

“I will send you the purification method by email.”

Young-Joon turned on his computer, opened his email, and began typing on his keyboard without any hesitation. It was natural since he was just writing down what Rosaline was showing him.

—Centrifugation for 2H at 13 000 rpm. Separate the plasma and purify with affinity chromatography with a HaloLink resin column. Use the following components for the buffer: 1. 140mM NaCl binding buffer, 3mM KCl, 10mM Na2HPO4...

“...”

Jung Hae-Rim, who was watching the scene with her mouth open, asked, “Did you major in protein purification?”

“No, what are you talking about? I majored in anticancer drugs.”

Young-Joon pressed the send button.

* * *

Young-Joon, who arrived in Congo, went to Kinshasa, the capital, with Michelle when he arrived at the airport. Young-Joon knew the situation was going to be dire when he received Michelle’s request for an urgent meeting, and he was right.

“Is there an Ebola outbreak?” Young-Joon asked.

“Yes,” Michelle replied.

“Is it bad?”

“Not really, but the reason I asked for a meeting so urgently is because the infection site is strange.”

“The site? You mean the ground?”

“Yes. And as far as I know, that isn’t a characteristic of Ebola. But all the infected bats and other animals nearby had Ebola symptoms,” Michelle said.

“Why is that?” Young-Joon asked.

With a tense face, Michelle replied, “I don’t know, Doctor Ryu. But what I know is...”

She gulped.

“I know that anthrax tends to contaminate the land in infected areas and cause a persistent epidemic.”