Powerful antibody could control dengue fever

A powerful antibody has been found in a recovered dengue patient which could be used to control the deadly disease.

Researchers in Singapore have extracted a powerful antibody from a recovered dengue patient in Singapore that can smother and choke the virus to death. There is no cure for the fever, which is estimated to kill around 20,000 people per year, many of whom are children. Physicians are only able to manage the symptoms.

However, a new antibody discovered from Singapore could offer hope for future controls. The sample was one of 200,000 taken from 100 recovered patients, and research has shown that it is capable of killing all known strains of the subtype 1 dengue virus. The paper has been published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Lok Shee-Mei of the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School and a member of the research team said: "It kills the dengue virus even before it can get a chance to infect any cell." In mice experiments, the team were able to demonstrate how the antibody stretched itself across the surface proteins of the virus, smothering it and locking it down.

"When the virus wants to infect cells, it needs to breathe and expand, so its surface proteins undergo slight changes ... but this antibody binds across the surface proteins, so the proteins cannot change in any sense. The virus is unable to infect," Lok told Reuters.

There are four disparate subtypes of the dengue virus, which causes an intensely painful fever. Patients with subtype 1 will be involved in clinical trials soon, with the team hoping to find similar antibodies that specifically target dengue subtypes 2, 3 and 4.

Paul MacAry, microbiology associate professor at the National University of Singapore's faculty of medicine said: "Ninety per cent of all dengue in Singapore is either type 1 or 2. This means that within the next six months to a year, we are going to have two antibodies that will allow us to treat most patients in Singapore."

Posted by Neil Clark