Antibodies From Camels May Protect Humans From MERS
By
News Staff | April 5th 2015 01:38 AM
Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which emerged in humans last year in the Saudi Arabian peninsula, causes severe respiratory disease, with a mortality rate of 35 percent. No specific therapy is currently available.
Passive immunization, a procedure where you inject a former patient's antibodies into a new patient to fight the disease, has been used in the past, including last year in a small number of cases of Ebola, but in the case of MERS, few former patients are available to donate antibodies. Additionally, their antibody titers are often too low, and many former patients are not healthy enough to donate.
A new study in the
Journal of Virology used antibodies from dromedary camels to protect uninfected mice from the disease and helped infected mice expunge the disease.
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