Breakthrough in Nipah virus vaccine development

A major breakthrough in vaccine development against the lethal Nipah virus has been reported by a team of federal and university scientists in the article, “A Hendra virus G glycoprotein subunit vaccine protects African green monkeys from Nipah virus challenge,” which will appear in Science Translational Medicine online.

Nipah virus and Hendra virus are classified by the NIH and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as agriculture threat agents. Recent Nipah outbreaks have resulted in acute respiratory distress syndrome and encephalitis, person-to-person transmission, and greater than 75% case fatality rates among humans.

The research team consisted of a collaborative group of investigators from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU), Bethesda, Maryland; the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) and Galveston National Laboratory (GNL); the National Institutes of Health (NIH’s) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Rocky Mountain Laboratories (RML); and the Boston University School of Medicine and National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories Institute (NEIDL).

The team of researchers, under the direction of Heinz Feldmann, M.D., Ph.D., chief of the RML, Laboratory of Virology, has demonstrated in experiments that immunizing African green monkeys with a vaccine based on the Hendra virus attachment G glycoprotein afforded complete protection against Nipah virus infection with no evidence of disease.

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