Virologists from the United States have created a new vaccine against Ebola, capable of neutralizing two of the most dangerous strains of its virus at once.
American molecular biologists and physicians have announced the successful trial of the first multipurpose vaccine against Ebola, capable of neutralizing the two most dangerous strains of this virus, according to an article published in Scientific Reports.
“Universal immunotherapy, working against different strains of the Ebola virus, will be a major breakthrough for us, as we cannot now predict which of the five strains of the pathogen will cause the next epidemic. In addition, the vaccine can be used prophylactically to protect health care providers working with Ebola patients,”said Jonathan Lai of Yeshiva University in New York, USA.
Lai and his colleagues have been working for several years to create various vaccines and vaccines against Ebola that can protect a person from contracting the disease and minimize the chances of death if it does happen.
Since the discovery of Ebola in 1976, scientists have found that there are not one, but five varieties of this virus on Earth. The most dangerous among them are two subspecies of the virus - Zaire Ebola, the culprit of the 2014 epidemic, and Sudanese Ebola, which in the past caused major outbreaks of fever. Three other strains - Reston, Ty-Forest and Bundibugio - did not cause large-scale epidemics and are found mainly among chimpanzees and bats.
Over the past two years, biologists, responding to medical calls, have developed several experimental vaccines for Ebola, all of which are able to cope only with the first strain of the virus, but not the Sudanese variant of the disease and other strains of the virus. This markedly limits their applicability in dealing with new outbreaks of Ebola.
The problem lies in the fact that the envelope of each type of virus differs markedly in its structure from the protein "armor" of other strains - more than half of their protein chains simply do not coincide. This does not allow the use of antibodies "trained" to fight one type of Ebola, to neutralize other varieties of the virus.
Lai's group solved this problem in part by creating a new type of antibody, assembled from parts of two other monoclonal antibodies designed to fight the Zaire and Sudanese Ebola viruses.
Promotional video:
Scientists have tested the work of these molecules on human cell cultures infected with Ebola, as well as on mice injected with a lethal dose of one or another virus. As these experiments showed, the new antibody did a good job of neutralizing both strains of fever, and also markedly reduced mortality among mice.
Now scientists are working to create a new version of this antibody, which would neutralize three strains of Ebola at once - Zaire, Sudan and Bundibugio, as well as the Marburg fever virus, which is evolutionarily close to Ebola.