Researchers Robert H. Purcell, NIAID's Laboratory of Infectious Diseases, and Bernard Moss, NIAID's Laboratory of Viral Diseases have developed a hybrid antibody which is found to prevent and treat small pox virus infection. Though Small pox virus as been eradicated world wide, there is an increased fear over the use of small pox virus as a bioterrorism tool to kill people.
Small pox referral strains are only available in two places in the world one at CDC, Atlanta and the other at Russian Laboratory. Anti-vaccinia immune globulin (VIG) is the vaccine used worldwide against small pox virus which is prepared from producing antibodies against a weak attenuated smallpox strain in humans and collecting these humanized antibodies from volunteers which can offer immunity against small pox wild strain. The newly prepared vaccine is a hybrid antibody from both chimpanzees and humans immunized antibody, this hybrid antibody as been found to be very effective in controlling the virus in small pox infected mice. The researchers have reported the results of their study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).Researchers feel that the new hybrid vaccine would be better than the VIG vaccine which causes serious complications in immunocompromised and children’s with skin diseases. The Hybrid vaccine was prepared from combining the antibodies derived from humans and chimpanzees, the bone marrow of hyper-immunized chimpanzees that effectively neutralizes the B5 protein of the virus and also contains the antibodies isolated from small pox humanized individuals containing the two antibodies 8AH7AL and 8AH8AL which effectively neutralized the virus.
