Monoclonal antibodies for Marburg virus treatment effective five days after infection

Monoclonal antibodies for Marburg virus treatment effective five days after infection
 

An antibody treatment successfully protected nonhuman primates against the deadly Marburg and Ravn viruses even when given five days after becoming infected, according to the latest findings published in in Science Translational Medicine.

There are currently no vaccines or drugs approved for human use to protect against the Marburg and Ravn viruses. These two filoviruses, which are in the same virus family as Ebola, cause severe and often lethal disease in people. The average case fatality rate of Marburg virus disease since the first recognized outbreak in 1967 is 80 percent.

Monoclonal antibodies are a technology that is currently in wide use for treating autoimmune diseases and cancers. There are more than 45 monoclonal antibodies approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and European Medicines Agency.

"In this paper, author demonstrated that one monoclonal antibody is able to protect up to 100 percent of Marburg or Ravn virus-infected non-human primates when the antibody treatment is given up to five days following exposure to a lethal amount of the virus," said the senior author. "These findings extend the growing body of evidence that monoclonal antibodies can provide protection during advanced stages of disease with highly dangerous viruses and could be useful during an epidemic."

"The level of protection observed by the team with this antibody is very impressive. We plan to advance this product towards human safety testing as quickly as possible," said the 
president of Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc.


https://www.utmb.edu/newsroom/article11484.aspx
http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/9/384/eaai8711

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