At present, infection with the rabies virus is incurable and almost always fatal once it has invaded the central nervous system, the victim being condemned to a horrible death. But researchers believe they have discovered a simple and effective treatment that can cure even advanced cases of rabies.
A monoclonal antibody injected into laboratory mice successfully protected them from a lethal dose of rabies virus, American researchers reported. “This is the first practical therapy for rabies,” said lead researcher Brian Schaefer, a professor of immunology at Bethesda University of Medical Sciences.
The antibody was created using the Australian bat lyssavirus, closely related to the rabies virus. The researchers designed the antibody to block the rabies virus and prevent its spread.
“The antibody is specific for the cell surface protein of the lyssavirus, which allows it to attach to target cells and infect the body’s cells,” Schaefer said.
Previous efforts to treat advanced rabies failed because the treatments failed to cross the blood-brain barrier (between blood and brain), the authors of the study stated.
But this antibody, even though it is too large to sneak into the nervous system and directly treat rabies, appears to prime the immune system to effectively fight the virus in the brain and spinal cord, Schaefer said.
The researchers were surprised to find that a single dose of the antibody effectively reversed the rabies infection even after it reached the nervous system, preventing death.
This antibody appears to stimulate the immune system to create smaller immune cells that can pass through the blood-brain barrier and reach the nervous system, where they effectively target and destroy the rabies virus, the study showed.
“It appears that the antibody acts on the periphery, outside the brain, to change the immune response so that the immune cells entering the brain become able to successfully fight the infection,” Schaefer said.
Low levels of the virus remained in the mice that received the antibody, but those levels did not increase, and signs of rabies did not immediately return, the results showed.
The next step would be to create a version of this antibody for humans and test it in clinical trials.
The rabies virus practically does not kill anyone in developed countries, considering the access of the citizens of these countries to immediate therapies that prevent the advanced disease, Schaefer said.
However, rabies kills approximately 60,000 people in the world every year, mainly in developing countries, so clinical trials should take place there.
“Probably the best place for this would be a country like India, where there is a fairly advanced health system, but there are still many cases of advanced rabies,” said Schaefer, who advocated for studies on humans: “Until now, there hasn’t really been a reliable treatment for rabies once the infection has set in. Considering the success of this therapy in mice, it certainly deserves to be further investigated in other animals and in humans.”
2023-10-02 09:18:13
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