A super antibody to fight all flu, what a launch for the VPU
November 2011
Influenza A virus infections pose a recurrent and global disease burden against which new vaccines, antivirals and high-throughput, sensitive methods for evaluating them are urgently required. Aquatic birds are the ‘reservoir’ for all 16 subtypes of influenza A viruses some of which (H5 and H7 “bird flu” and H1 “swine flu”) present a serious danger to human health through zoonotic transmission, usually via a domestic poultry or pig intermediary.
Medway School of Pharmacy senior lecturer Dr Nigel Temperton has pioneered the development and production of novel, safe, replication-defective retroviruses expressing influenza H5 or H7 antigenic proteins on their surface (pseudotypes) for use as surrogate viruses in neutralizing antibody assays that can be effectively employed for the evaluation of therapeutics and vaccines.
In order to capitalize on these new tools, in January 2011 Dr Temperton and Dr Simon Scott established the Viral Pseudotype Unit (VPU) within the School of Pharmacy, a purpose built, viral pseudotype assay laboratory. Dr Temperton said of the new laboratory “The role of the VPU is to act as an interface between academia, industry, animal and public health laboratories with the purpose of translating basic virus research into assays that can be readily employed for the efficacy testing of vaccines, antivirals and therapeutic antibodies.” Dr Scott said “This is an exciting new resource for the virology community”.
Recently, Dr Temperton, working as part of a large consortium led by Professor Antonio Lanzavecchia has developed a large panel of H5 and H7 pseudotypes that have been used on a high-throughput screening platform to isolate a “super antibody” from donor plasma cells, called FI6, that inactivates all 16 influenza subtypes, thus paving the way for the future development of a universal vaccine. This study was published in the prestigious journal Science and was reported at the BBC News website.
