Adults who have recovered from the potentially deadly H5N1 strain of avian influenza may hold the key to future treatments for the virus, according to an international team of researchers.
In a study published in the open access journal ‘PLoS Medicine’, the researchers have shown how specific antibodies taken from avian flu survivors in Vietnam can be reproduced in the laboratory and prove effective at neutralising the virus in culture vitro and in mice.
Doctors based at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Bellinzona, Switzerland; and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, USA have shown that monoclonal antibodies generated from blood of human survivors of the H5N1 virus are effective at both preventing infection in mice and neutralising the virus in those already infected.
The researchers found that the antibodies provided significant immunity to mice that were subsequently infected with the Vietnam strain of H5N1. This reduced significantly the amount of virus found in the lungs and almost completely prevented the virus reaching the brain or spleen. In those people in Vietnam who died from the H5N1 strain, the virus was found to have spread from the lungs; this was not the case in those who survived.
The research had been fast-tracked for funding by the Trust and is also supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health in the US and the Swiss National Science Foundation.