Possible Marburg Virus Vaccine Created

U.S. and Canadian scientists have shown the effectiveness of a vaccine in preventing hemorrhagic fever in monkeys after exposure to the Marburg virus.

Marburg is a filovirus that causes internal bleeding at multiple sites with patients usually dying as a result of multiple organ failure. Both the Marburg and Ebola viruses are potential agents of bioterrorism and no effective vaccines or drugs against Marburg yet exist.

Investigators from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and the National Microbiology Laboratory at the Public Health Agency of Canada located in Winnipeg, Manitoba — the site of Canada’s only level-4 microbiology lab — created the vaccine by replacing a gene from a harmless virus — known as vesicular stomatitis virus — with a gene encoding a Marburg virus surface protein.

The team infected five monkeys with the Marburg virus and then injected them with the vaccine. Three other monkeys infected with Marburg acted as controls and received a vaccine without the Marburg protein.

All the monkeys treated with the VSV vaccine survived for at least 80 days, while the controls succumbed by day 12.

The findings appear in the online edition of the British medical journal The Lancet.