WIKIMEDIA, PERETZ PARTENSKYImmunization of dromedary camels with a novel vaccine against the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) resulted in an immune response in the animals and reduced infection following a MERS challenge. The study, the first to analyze the effect of a MERS-CoV vaccine on viral load in camels, is published today (December 17) in Science.
“This study is an important step forward in the research and development of countermeasures for MERS-CoV,” Kayvon Modjarrad, an infectious disease specialist at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Bethesda, Maryland, who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email to The Scientist.
Virologist Bart Haagmans of the Erasmus Medical Center, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and his colleagues tested the efficacy of a MERS vaccine consisting of a modified vaccinia virus Ankara (MVA) vector in an eight-camel pilot study. The vaccine virus expresses the MERS-CoV spike protein, which is found in other MERS vaccines being tested.
The researchers inoculated four dromedary camels with the vaccine and four animals with a control MVA vaccine virus, by injection (in the neck) and delivering ...
