Suchergebnisse

Recent Ebola virus (EBOV) outbreaks in West Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have highlighted the urgent need for approval of medical countermeasures for treatment and prevention of EBOV disease (EVD). Until recently, when successes were achieved in characterizing the efficacy of multiple experimental EVD therapeutics in humans, the only feasible way to obtain data regarding potential clinical benefits of candidate therapeutics was by conducting well-controlled animal studies. Nonclinical studies are likely to continue to be important tools for screening and development of new candidates with improved pharmacological properties. Here, we describe a natural history study to characterize the time course and order of progression of the disease manifestations of EVD in rhesus monkeys. In 12 rhesus monkeys exposed by the intramuscular route to 1000 plaque-forming units of EBOV, multiple endpoints were monitored for 28 days following exposure. The disease progressed rapidly with mortality events occurring 7–10 days after exposure. Key disease manifestations observed consistently across the infected animals included, but were not limited to, viremia, fever, systemic inflammation, coagulopathy, lymphocytolysis, renal tubular necrosis with mineralization, and hepatocellular degeneration and necrosis.

The task of international expert groups is to recommend the classification and naming of viruses. The ICTV Filoviridae Study Group and other experts have recently established an almost consistent classification and nomenclature for filoviruses. Here, further guidelines are suggested to include their natural genetic variants. First, this term is defined. Second, a template for full-length virus names (such as "Ebola virus H.sapiens-tc/COD/1995/Kikwit-9510621") is proposed. These names contain information on the identity of the virus (e.g., Ebola virus), isolation host (e.g., members of the species Homo sapiens), sampling location (e.g., Democratic Republic of the Congo (COD)), sampling year, genetic variant (e.g., Kikwit), and isolate (e.g., 9510621). Suffixes are proposed for individual names that clarify whether a given genetic variant has been characterized based on passage zero material (-wt), has been passaged in tissue/cell culture (-tc), is known from consensus sequence fragments only (-frag), or does (most likely) not exist anymore (-hist). We suggest that these comprehensive names are to be used specifically in the methods section of publications. Suitable abbreviations, also proposed here, could then be used throughout the text, while the full names could be used again in phylograms, tables, or figures if the contained information aids the interpretation of presented data. The proposed system is very similar to the well-known influenzavirus nomenclature and the nomenclature recently proposed for rotaviruses. If applied consistently, it would considerably simplify retrieval of sequence data from electronic databases and be a first important step toward a viral genome annotation standard as sought by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Furthermore, adoption of this nomenclature would increase the general understanding of filovirus-related publications and presentations and improve figures such as phylograms, alignments, and diagrams. Most importantly, it would counter the increasing ...