Rabies virus kills a shocking 59,000 people each year, many of them children. Some victims, especially kids, don’t realize they’ve been exposed until it is too late. For others, the intense rabies treatment regimen is out of the question: treatment is not widely available and the average $3,800 expense poses unthinkable economic burden for most people around the world.
Rabies vaccines, rather than treatments, are much more affordable and easier to administer. But those vaccines also come with a massive downside:
“Rabies vaccines don’t provide lifelong protection. You have to get your pets boosted every year to three years,” says LJI Professor Erica Ollmann Saphire, Ph.D. “Right now, rabies vaccines for humans and domestic animals are made from killed virus. But this inactivation process can cause the molecules to become misshapen — so these vaccines aren’t showing the right form to the immune system. If we made a better shaped, better structured vaccine, would immunity last longer?”
Saphire and her team, in collaboration with a team led by Hervé Bourhy, Ph.D., at the Institut Pasteur, may have discovered the path to better vaccine design. In a new study, published in Science Advances, the researchers share one of the first high-resolution looks at the rabies virus glycoprotein in its vulnerable “trimeric” form.
“The rabies glycoprotein is the only protein that rabies expresses on its surface, which means it is going to be the major target of neutralizing antibodies during an infection,” says LJI Postdoctoral Fellow Heather Callaway, Ph.D., who serves as the study’s first author.
“Rabies is the most lethal virus we know. It is so much a part of our history — we’ve lived with its specter for hundreds of years,” adds Saphire, who also serves as LJI’s President and CEO. “Yet scientists have never observed the organization of its surface molecule. It is important to understand that structure to make more effective vaccines and treatments — and to understand how rabies and other viruses like it enter cells.”
Rabies the shapeshifter
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