Researchers hope to harness survivors' antibodies and use them to concoct drug cocktails like ZMapp -- a drug containing mouse-derived antibodies that has been used to treat several Ebola patients. Alexander Bukreyev's lab at UTMB has been working to see which antibodies isolated from Ebola survivors’ blood can effectively fight Ebola. "There are two ultimate goals," Bukreyev said. "To develop therapeutic antibodies to treat this infection, and to understand the human immune response to this infection -- what is the mechanism of the successful immune response of the survivors?” So far, Bukreyev says, several dozen antibodies have kept the cells alive, and preliminary data suggest that at least three can protect mice from Ebola infections. It's too soon to say for sure how the antibodies are stopping the virus, but at least one of them appears to neutralize several strains of Ebola, not just one.