ViroBlogy

Excellent graphic!

OK, not new nws, but something I will pay attaention to, at my age…B-)

Virus Rules OK!  Thanks @AJCann.

"The gene sequences confirm that this is an avian virus, and that it is a low pathogenic form (meaning it is likely to cause mild disease in birds)," said Wendy Barclay, a flu virologist at Britain’s Imperial College London.

"But what the sequences also reveal is that there are some mammalian adapting mutations in some of the genes."

Sinister…but interesting that a LPAI should be so lethal in humans??

And so it begins…hopefully NOT!

So they say they have a strategy to mimic natural infection, where an arms race between generation of antibody binding site diveristy and Env epitopes results in increasingly good neutralising antibodies to Env – and that this could lead to a vaccine.

Um.  Yeeeessss…for a single patient, given that this is what they followed??  And now that they will follow other single patients, might they not show that each person’s responses evolve completely differently?

So this is good science – in fact, it is GREAT science.  However – right now that is all it is; like so much of HIV research, answering hypothesis-generated questions leads to more more hypotheses, and more good science, and more publications….BUT NO VACCINES.  In fact, the ONLY vaccines which have made it into Phase III clinical trial are nothing like what people seem to think will work, and only got there because the people who pushed for the trials pretty much ignored the basic scientists.

A potential flaw in the whole approach is looking at what NATURAL infections do.  That this may not be relevant is shown by the case of one of the most successful of recent vaccines, which is Human papillomavirus (HPV) VLPs, because the virus infects epithelial cells in a topical manner, is cleared by cell-mediated immune responses and elicits only weak antibody responses which are protective, whereas the vaccine is given via injection, and elicits very high neutralising antibody responses which are protective – but are of no use against established infections.

But the trains roll on, and new approaches keep getting unearthed, and maybe we will yet get efficacious HIV vaccines.

Maybe.

There’s a new one: zombified virus!!  So basically, just virus-like particles – like the Hepatitis B virus vaccine that’s been on sale for years, and the Human papillomavirus vaccines that have been blockbusting the industry in the last couple.

And not new, either: others have previously tried the same approach – in plants, no less – and been successful.  But they were from Argentina.

We do all sorts of flu here…looks like a useful niche market!

Putting viruses to work!  Love it.

I love misinformative headlines – and the sub-editors who write them [NOT!!].  Do they mean "virus of synthetic farms"?  "Synthetic virus infecting farms"?

What they ACTUALLY mean here is that folk in Scotland have used a reverse genetics approach (=made an infectious clone, by expressing genomic RNA from a cDNA in the presence of appropriate viral proteins co-expressed form another DNA) to make infectious Schmallenberg virus, which causes abortion in sheep, among other things.

Now it is interesting that, although these guys claim to have made a MORE virulent form of the virus in mice, that there is no outcry, along the lines of the H5N1 saga of recent times.  And possibly there should be, because no-one knows what happens to the host range if you passage the virus in mice, not to mention transmissibility.