Test Vaccine Protects Monkeys from Nipah Virus

Researchers have successfully tested in monkeys a vaccine against Nipah virus, a human pathogen that emerged in 1998 during a large outbreak of infection and disease among pigs and pig farmers in Southeast Asia. This latest advance builds upon earlier work by the scientists, who found that the same vaccine can protect cats from Nipah virus and ferrets and horses from the closely related Hendra virus. The latest work was published online on Agust 8, 2012 in Science Translational Medicine. Both viruses have a high fatality rate in humans—more than 75 percent for Nipah and 60 percent for Hendra. Infections by these viruses target the lungs and brain, and disease outbreaks have occurred regularly in the past decade. Nipah outbreaks have occurred in Malaysia, Singapore, Bangladesh, and India. Hendra outbreaks have remained confined to Australia since its emergence there in horses and humans in 1994. Certain fruit bats, also known as flying foxes, spread the viruses; so far, only Nipah is known to spread from person-to-person. The research group developed a vaccine based on a Hendra virus surface protein, the G glycoprotein, a known target for triggering a protective host immune response. In this study, they used the recently developed African green monkey model of Nipah disease to test three different doses of the vaccine in combination with an adjuvant. All nine vaccinated animals survived a lethal Nipah virus challenge given 42 days after the initial vaccination. Christopher Broder, Ph.D., of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU) and Katharine Bossart, Ph.D., a former USU graduate student now at Boston University, developed the vaccine.
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