A team of U.S. and Canadian scientists has demonstrated the effectiveness of a vaccine in preventing the development of hemorrhagic fever in an animal model after exposure to the deadly Marburg virus. Their findings, published in the April 27 online edition of the British medical journal The Lancet, could have implications for human use.

Marburg virus was first detected in 1967 and was the cause of a large outbreak in Angola in 2004-2005 that resulted in several hundred deaths with case fatality rates of about 90 percent. Like the Ebola virus, Marburg is a filovirus that causes internal bleeding at multiple sites with patients usually dying as a result of multiple organ failure. Both viruses are considered to be potential agents of bioterrorism. Currently, no effective vaccines or drugs against Marburg virus exist, and treatment of the disease is limited to supportive care.

Investigators from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) and the National Microbiology Laboratory at the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) created the vaccine against Marburg virus by replacing a gene from a harmless virus--known as vesicular stomatitis virus, or VSV--with a gene encoding a Marburg virus surface protein.

The team infected five rhesus monkeys with the Marburg virus and then injected them with the vaccine (known as recombinant VSV, or rVSV) 20 to 30 minutes later.

Another three monkeys infected with Marburg virus acted as controls and received a vaccine without the Marburg protein.

All of the monkeys treated with rVSV following exposure to the Marburg virus survived for at least 80 days, while the controls succumbed to the disease by day 12.

In a study published in June 2005, the research team reported that the rVSV vaccine could prevent Marburg hemorrhagic fever from developing when administered before infection. The new results suggest that the vaccine could also be an effective post-e
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26-Apr-2006