Antibodies taken from people with Dengue virus can be used to treat Zika infection in rodents, offering new hope for a single therapy that will treat both viruses in humans, researchers reported last night.
Researchers at Imperial College London, England, and Washington University in St Louis, USA, also found that the antibodies were sufficiently effective to protect even the unborn pups in pregnant Zika-infected mice.
It is the first time that the antibodies have been found to be effective for Zika infection and the study builds on the team’s previous research, which identified that Dengue virus produced antibodies, which recognise the virus and stick to its surface, singling out Dengue for destruction. They also found that the same class of antibodies recognised the Zika virus, which is closely related to Dengue.
These new findings are published in the latest edition of Nature Immunology.
Senior author Professor Gavin Screaton, dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial, said: "This paper shows for the first time that antibodies we had previously found to be effective against Dengue potently protect against Zika virus in mice and can treat the early stages of infection."
The team treated Zika-infected animals with the antibodies in the first five days of infection and monitored them for 21 days.
They found that antibody treatment reduced deaths and weight loss in the rodents compared to a control group and that treatment reduced the damage caused by the virus. Pregnant mice infected with Zika lost one in 10 pups, compared to a 90% loss in control animals.
The group is now looking to develop a vaccine based on the target of the antibodies and hope that introducing protein pairs into the blood stream will enable the body’s immune cells to recognise them as a virus and make antibodies to counter them.
“This group of antibodies is unique in being able to target Dengue and Zika. The next step is to see whether they are effective in larger animal models, and potentially even humans,” said Prof Screaton.
“The threat from Zika is clearly not as great as it was, but nobody knows when it’s going to come back. It might be a number of years between now and the emergence of another big epidemic.”
Fernandez E, Dejnirattisai W, Cao B et al. Human antibodies to the dengue virus E-dimer epitope have therapeutic activity against Zika virus infection. Nature Immunology September 2017. doi:10.1038/ni.3849
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