Vaccine protects monkeys from lethal 'Contagion' virus

Contagion, Steven Soderbergh's 2011 film, wasn't all fiction. The bat-borne virus that it was based on has caused hundreds of deaths since it appeared in the 1990s. This week, a new vaccine has been shown to protect monkeys against the virus, offering hope that the treatment could soon be used in humans.

Nipah virus, (NiV) the real-life disease, first emerged in a village in Malaysia in 1998. Just like the movie, victims presented symptoms including coughing, fever and weakness, followed by death.

Since 2001, fatal outbreaks of the virus among people have occurred annually in Bangladesh and India.

Hendra virus (HeV), a close relative of NiV, also recently emerged ? this time in Australia in 1994. First isolated among racehorses in a large stable in the suburb of Brisbane from which it takes its name, Hendra has popped up in the states of Queensland and New South Wales nearly every year since.

Both viruses are initially spread from fruit bats, more commonly known as flying foxes. NiV is directly transmissible to people, often via the consumption of date palm sap, which the bats contaminate with saliva or excreta. Hendra passes to horses and then humans.

Last year, Katharine Bossart, then at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, and colleagues, developed a vaccine that could protect monkeys against Hendra (Science Translational Medicine, DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3002901). Now, Bossart, together with an international collaboration of researchers, has shown that the vaccine can also protect against NiV.

Based on a single Hendra virus protein called G glycoprotein, the vaccine protected all African green monkeys challenged with NiV. The vaccine works by blocking the ability of the viruses to bind to host cell receptors.

Jonathan Epstein, associate vice president of conservation medicine at EcoHealth Alliance in New York and an expert on Nipah virus in Bangladesh, says, "The ability to vaccinate people and animals at high risk of exposure, such as physicians in Bangladesh, equine veterinarians in Australia, or horses in Australia, will not only save lives but could potentially limit the magnitude of outbreaks."

"Given prior work in other animal models it is not surprising that the vaccine protects monkeys from lethal challenge with Nipah virus. Nonetheless, it is important to prove that it does," says W. Ian Lipkin, scientific consultant for Contagion and director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, New York. "In the event Nipah ever goes viral off the silver screen, this vaccine could become an important tool for public health."

Journal reference: Science Translational Medicine, DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3004241

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