U.S. researchers said Wednesday that they have used a human antibody called m102.4 to successfully treat 12 monkeys infected with deadly Nipah virus, a breakthrough therapy they believe has the potential for human therapeutic applications.
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.
Previously, researchers from the University of Texas, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and the U.S. National Institutes of Health have found that the patented m102.4 antibody therapy could protect nonhuman primates from a deadly Hendra infection.
In their new study appearing in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the group reported the antibody therapy also protected 12 African green monkeys from disease at several time points after Nipah exposure, including the onset of clinical illness in this lethal disease.
"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 8 to 10 days of infection," said first author Thomas Geisbert, professor of University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.
"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."
Based on the new data and previous work with this antibody with Hendra virus experiments, the researchers said they plan to start a phase I clinical safety trial with m102.4 later this year in Australia..