Treatment For Deadly Nipah On The Horizon

The monoclonal antibody m102.4 prevents death in primates infected with Nipah virus even when administered 5 days after infection.

AsianScientist (Jun 30, 2014) – An interdisciplinary research team has developed the first effective antiviral treatment for Nipah virus, a human monoclonal antibody known as m102.4.

Nipah and the closely related Hendra virus are highly infectious agents that emerged from Pteropid fruit bats in the 1990s, causing serious disease outbreaks in a variety of domestic animals and humans in Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Bangladesh and India. Recent Nipah outbreaks have resulted in acute respiratory distress syndrome and encephalitis, person-to-person transmission and greater than 90 percent fatality rates among people. These properties make both Nipah and Hendra viruses a concern to human and livestock health.

Previous studies have found that the patented m102.4 antibody therapy could protect nonhuman primates from Hendra infection. In a paper published in Science Translational Medicine, the group now shows that m102.4 antibody therapy also protects against Nipah disease at several time points after exposure to the virus, including the onset of clinical illness.

“What makes this study unique is that we have achieved complete protection against death even in animals that received treatment five days after being infected with the Nipah virus when they otherwise would have succumbed within eight to ten days of infection,” according to University of Texas Medical Branch professor Thomas Geisbert, first author of the paper. “This recent success of the antibody therapy against Nipah virus disease in a nonhuman primate is a key step towards its development as a therapeutic for use in people.”

Christopher Broder, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences professor and Geisbert’s fellow senior author, stated that because of the new data and previous work with this antibody with Hendra virus experiments, “there was sufficient interest for the Queensland government in Australia to initiate a phase I clinical safety trial with m102.4 that is set to commence later this year.”

The article can be found at: Geisbert et al. (2014) Therapeutic Treatment of Nipah Virus Infection in Nonhuman Primates with a Neutralizing Human Monoclonal Antibody.

——-

Source: University of Texas Medical Branch.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.

Asian Scientist Magazine is an award-winning science and technology magazine that highlights R&D news stories from Asia to a global audience. The magazine is published by Singapore-headquartered Wildtype Media Group.

Related Stories from Asian Scientist