New MERS vaccine fully protects monkeys

US researchers have claimed that monkeys were protected by an experimental vaccine against the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).

Rana Sidani of the World Health Organization’s Eastern Mediterranean office says that a vaccine is needed as soon as possible because MERS is rampant and millions of Islamic pilgrims visit the country.

The investigators used structural information about a viral protein called the spike (S) glycoprotein, which MERS-CoV uses to enter cells, to design a number of experimental vaccines that they administered to mice in a two-step regimen involving an initial “priming” injection followed several weeks later by the same or a different “booster” vaccine.

The Mers virus can cause breathing problems, fever, pneumonia and kidney failure, and is believed to have passed to humans from camels. “Accordingly, the development of a vaccine for MERS remains a high priority”, said study author David Weiner, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the university’s Perelman School of Medicine. This was the first time that an outbreak was reported outside of the Middle East and it highlighted even more the need for antiviral treatments or vaccines that can prevent people from getting sick. The disease first surfaced in Saudi Arabia in 2012 where majority of the infected cases come from. One of the more pronounced outbreaks was recorded in South Korea earlier in the year, which resulted in over 181 infections and over 30 deaths.

MERS is caused by an emerging human coronavirus, which is distinct from the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) coronavirus. That is how fatal the disease is. Since its identification, MERS has been linked to over 1,300 infections and over 500 deaths.

A health care worker wears protective gear as she cares for a MERS patient at Seoul Medical Center where eight MERS patients are hospitalized on June 10, 2015 in Seoul, South Korea.

“Once again, our data demonstrates we can rapidly turn our SynCon DNA-based immunotherapy platform to create innovative products with the potential to prevent and treat multiple infectious diseases and cancers”, Dr. J. Joseph Kim, president and CEO of Inovio, said. During this outbreak, rapid human-to-human transmission was documented with in-hospital transmission the most common route of infection.