A team of scientists has identified effective and novel mechanisms to block chikungunya virus.
Scientists at Blood Systems Research Institute (BSRI) in San Francisco and the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis looking at the antiviral mechanisms of two previously identified human monoclonal antibodies have found they potently inhibit chikungunya virus (CHIKV) at multiple stages of infection.
Researchers have found that neutralizing antibodies that engage epitopes including residue E2-W64 are highly potent at inhibiting the virus in mice, due to the importance of E2-W64 in pathogenicity.
Furthermore, these antibodies prevent CHIKV from both entering and exiting cells, whereas prior studies of neutralizing antibodies to CHIKV and multiple other classes of viruses have focused on the capacity to block viruses from entering a cell.
Lead researcher Graham Simmons, together with Dr. Jing Jin, view these recent discoveries in the scope of a greater body of work that he and other researchers are doing to understand and combat CHIKV and other viruses.
The research is published in Cell Reports.
