Slashdot Mirror
Ebola Vaccine On The Horizon?
coryboehne writes "A highly interesting article on the CBS news website gives some very promising information on a fast acting single-shot Ebola vaccine. This is an important step because it will allow an outbreak of Ebola to be stopped quickly."
They already have an Ebola vaccine that works in monkeys. It isn't convenient enough to use large-scale however. It takes multiple shots spread over months and it takes 8 months to build up real immunity to Ebola.
It will be good if one of these research teams succeed in making a fast-acting single-shot vaccine. They talked about this on NPR this morning on Morning Edition I think. www.npr.org
Stop the Slashdot Effect! Don't read the articles!
The incident in Virginia wasn't an outbreak. The strain (now called Ebola Reston) spread through a population of imported monkeys in 1989. Six people seroconverted, but none developed any filovirus-related illness from their exposure to Ebola Reston.
In order for it to be considered an "outbreak," human beings have to get sick. They didn't.
Ebola is actually no big deal, immunologically speaking. It's hard to contract, and it requires a massive viral load before the patient becomes symptomatic. Patients that superconvert often die horribly, but the likelihood that any given exposure will turn into a superconversion are miniscule.
a more informative write up can be found at nature (there's a link to the actual research at the bottom, for those whose institutions suscribe).
rather than infect the host with dead/weakened ebola, they took the ebola gene that is responsible for making the coat protein (the capsid which surrounds the nucleic material), and inserted that gene into the adenovirus genome. andenovirus infects cell. ebola gene is activated and starts making lots of ebola coat protein. host response kicks in and starts making antibodies for both adenovirus proteins as well as ebola proteins (apparently adenovirus triggers big host response, although adenovirus really isn't that dangerous). host now has a plethora of ebola antibodies.
this particular trick should be useful for almost any virus for which the coat protein genes are known.