Scientists make breakthrough in understanding deadly virus
Print Edition
SCIENTISTS studying the lethal Ebola virus say they have found how it blocks and disables the body’s ability to battle infections in a discovery that should help the search for potential cures and vaccines.
In the largest and deadliest outbreak of the disease yet recorded, Ebola has killed more than 1,000 people in West Africa since March.
A group of scientists in the United States found that Ebola carries a protein called VP24 that interferes with a molecule called interferon, which is vital to the immune response.
“One of the key reasons the Ebola virus is so deadly is because it disrupts the body’s immune response to the infection,” said Chris Basler of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, who worked on the study.
“Figuring out how VP24 promotes this disruption will suggest new ways to defeat it.”
The team, lead by Gaya Amarasinghe from Washington University School of Medicine, found that VP24 works by stopping something called “transcription factor STAT1” — which carries interferon’s antiviral message — from entering the nucleus of a cell and initiating an immune response.
“This study shows just how nefarious the Ebola virus can be,” said Ben Neuman, a virologist at England’s Reading University who was not directly involved in the study.
“(The) virus carries a small tool that intercepts the cell’s distress signals, and when this happens, it disables some of the most useful machinery that our bodies have for fighting Ebola. That leaves the body with only crude defenses that are less effective at stopping the virus, and end up causing much of the damage that can eventually lead to death.”
Ebola is one of the most deadly diseases known in humans and has a case fatality rate of up to 90 percent. In the current epidemic in West Africa, it has infected more than 1,800 people. So far, 1,013 of these have died, the vast majority in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Amarasingh’s team, whose work was published in the journal Cell yesterday, said understanding how Ebola disarms immune defenses will be crucial in the development of new treatments.
A World Health Organization-convened panel of experts said on Tuesday that patients infected with Ebola in the West African outbreak could be offered experimental drugs.
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