AsianScientist (Jan. 20, 2017) – Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology have found that blood serum from recovering patients can prevent Zika virus replication and microcephaly in mice. These findings have been published in Cell Research.
Zika is an emerging mosquito-transmitted flavivirus that can cause severe disease. Recent Zika epidemics are linked to Guillain-Barre syndrome in adults and microcephaly in fetuses. Specific treatments or vaccines for Zika are not available, making the development of therapeutic agents against Zika extremely urgent.
Using the serum of a patient who recovered from a Zika infection two months before (convalescent serum), researchers led by Professor Xu Zhiheng found that the serum could neutralize the Zika virus in vitro.
To test whether the serum had therapeutic activity in vivo, they injected approximately 650 plaque forming units of Zika virus into the brains of embryonic mice. The pregnant mothers were then given either a control, healthy human serum or the convalescent serum on the first and second day after the embryos were infected with Zika.
Fetuses from mothers who had been given the control or healthy human serum showed high levels of Zika virus and cell death in the brains. In comparison, fetuses from convalescent serum treated mothers had dramatically reduced levels of Zika virus replication and cell death.
Furthermore, the researchers found that convalescent serum could prevent microcephaly induced by Zika virus infection. The serum treatment also effectively rescues the thinning of the cortical plate and ventricular zone/subventicular zone, dysregulation of neural progenitor cell cycle and proliferation which was observed in the infected fetal brains.
The results demonstrated that passive transfer of convalescent serum containing high-titer neutralizing antibodies can protect against fetal infection and microcephaly, which highlight the potential application of monoclonal antibodies in pregnant women in the endemic regions.
The article can be found at: Wang et al. (2017) Transfer of Convalescent Serum to Pregnant Mice Prevents Zika Virus Infection and Microcephaly in Offspring.
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Source: Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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