Colorized transmission electron micrograph of Avian influenza A H5N1 viruses. Credit score: Public Area
A staff that features researchers from the College of Pittsburgh and the Nationwide Institutes of Well being Vaccine Analysis Heart say they’ve discovered that an antibody remedy lessened the severity and prevented dying in monkeys that contacted the chook flu.
The journal Science printed the staff’s findings, which discover the preventive results of administering a neutralizing antibody earlier than an infection to attenuate extreme illness attributable to H5N1 avian flu.
Douglas Reed, affiliate professor of immunology at Pitt’s Faculty of Drugs and a school member of its Heart for Vaccine Analysis, mentioned one of these remedy differs from a conventional vaccine however the primary precept of utilizing antibody remedy to forestall and deal with illness has been round for greater than 100 years.
“Vaccines help the body make its own antibodies. In contrast, inoculation with a broadly neutralizing antibody offers more direct protection by binding to and neutralizing H5N1 virus particles,” mentioned Mr. Reed, who’s the research’s co-corresponding creator.
The NIH’s Nationwide Most cancers Institute describes a neutralizing antibody as one which “binds to a virus and interferes with its ability to infect a cell.”
Within the research, monkeys have been inoculated with a neutralizing antibody referred to as MEDI8852, which was developed by biopharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca, earlier than being contaminated with chook flu three days later.
“We chose this specific antibody because it targets a part of the influenza virus called the stalk region of the hemagglutinin protein, which stays the same across different flu strains. Focusing on this stable part of the virus makes it harder for the virus to mutate and avoid the antibody,” Mr. Reed mentioned.
Stalk-targeting antibodies, just like the one used within the research, have been discovered to guard towards a greater diversity of flu viruses than those who goal much less conserved elements, Mr. Reed defined.
“That said, antibody inoculation is not intended to protect against an infection, but can make the disease symptoms less severe and protect against death.”
Whether or not the virus will mutate past animal to human transmission is troublesome to know, and specialists proceed to warn {that a} mutation like that would result in a pandemic on the dimensions of COVID-19—or bigger.
“H5N1 is showing all signs that it could be as severe if not more severe than [COVID-19] when it entered the population. It’s hard to predict. We already know that hundreds have died [from avian flu infection] over the past 20 years,” Andrew Pekosz informed the Publish-Gazette in January. He’s professor and vice chair of the molecular microbiology and immunology division on the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Faculty of Public Well being in Baltimore.
“There is a big potential for this virus to cause a lot of suffering in the human population should it acquire the ability to transmit from person to person,” he mentioned.
For the monkeys within the research, “the antibody protected against disease and death,” Mr. Reed mentioned, although researchers “did see disease breakthrough at lower doses.” That data was used to determine a “threshold protection.”
Researchers additionally famous that the protecting serum ranges “remained stable for eight to 12 weeks, which suggests to us that this prophylactic treatment could be useful for protecting first responders during the early stages of a H5N1 outbreak,” he mentioned.
Extra research are wanted to have the ability to use the therapy in people, he mentioned, however “this antibody has already been in clinical trials for seasonal influenza and was shown to be safe.”
As a result of the neutralizing antibody “targets a region that is relatively conserved in all influenza viruses, it could provide universal protection against different types of influenza, including seasonal flu, but more testing is still needed. We see this immunization approach as one of many in the arsenal of infection prevention tools for controlling infection outbreaks.”
Since 2024, the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention has confirmed one U.S. dying and 70 human infections from the chook flu; since January 2022, additionally per the CDC, practically 170 million wild and home birds have been affected by the extremely pathogenic avian influenza. The sick birds have been reported in all U.S. states.
As of Friday, greater than 1,000 cattle herds throughout 17 states had been contaminated with H5N1 since March 2024, in response to knowledge from the U.S. Division of Agriculture. No infections have been reported in Pennsylvania.
Extra data:
Masaru Kanekiyo et al, Pre-exposure antibody prophylaxis protects macaques from extreme influenza, Science (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.ado6481
2025 PG Publishing Co. Distributed by Tribune Content material Company, LLC.
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Antibody remedy explored to fight chook flu (2025, Could 5)
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