ViroBlogy

The research team is pursuing the inactivated rabies/Ebola vaccine for use in humans. The live vaccine is being developed for use in protecting wildlife at risk of Ebola virus infection in Africa, which could also serve to prevent transmission into the human population.

Source: www.niaid.nih.gov

I missed this one at the time – and it is an interesting piece of news.  Basically, the research team cloned the Ebola envelope glycoprotein GP1 into the extant rabies virus vaccine strain genome, and tested a live version, a replication-deficient version, and a killed whole virion version in macaques.

Their results are interesting enough – 100% protection against challenge for live, 50% for the other two – that they plan to follow up to see whether or not additional doses could improve protection in the two non-replicating versions, and to make a “multivalent filovirus vaccine”.

This can only be welcome news against the backdrop of the still-ongoing epidemic in West Africa – where two other vaccines (recombinant vesicular stomatitis and chimpanzee adenovirus) are probably going to be trialled next year. The rabies version at least is based on a very well characterised vaccine that already protects against an extremely deadly disease – it remains to be seen how well the other two do.

I forgot to mention that I found reference to this article on “The Zombie Research Society”‘s blog site: http://zombieresearchsociety.com/archives/25562. A very apt place if one considers the parallels that are already being drawn between Ebola and a “zombie virus”.

And because I like zombies B-)

See on Scoop.it – Virology News

This entry was posted on 26 October, 2014 at 11:13 and is filed under biotechnology, Ebola, Ebola, Evolution, General Virology, Vaccines: General, Viruses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.