Ebola VirionsWIKIMEDIA COMMONS, PLOS
Researchers have a new hope in the fight against the possibility of a biological attack—an Ebola vaccine that protects mice from the hemorrhagic fever’s deadly grip. The vaccine combines antigens with a protein in complex to prime a more robust immune response, and can be grown quickly in tobacco plants, making it feasible to quickly ramp up production in the event that the Ebola virus is released as part of a terrorist attack, according to the study published Monday (December 5) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The combination of an antibody, an antigen, and an immune booster is novel, said Erica Ollmann Saphire, a structural biologist at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., who was not involved in the study. ...
