nipah virus
In particular, he is currently focused on Nipah virus, which has a high mortality rate.
“I am working on vaccines for the Nipah virus, which causes cases in Bangladesh. There is no vaccine and there is no treatment. And we have to rely on tracing outbreaks and then Have to stop as soon as possible by quarantining.”
“But we may have a vaccine against Nipah virus that is stocked, tested, approved. Then in the future, if there is an outbreak, that vaccine can be used very quickly. and can be used even before an outbreak to protect healthcare workers.”
That way, health workers are protected when they go to help people infected with the virus, Gilbert said. This approach can be taken for viruses that public health officials already know about and that keep coming back and causing smaller outbreaks.
The more difficult problem is what to do about new viruses that scientists have never seen before, Gilbert said.
“I think we should be thinking about different types of viruses, different families of viruses,” she said.
“So SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, is a coronavirus. And [we] was already working on a vaccine against another coronavirus, MERS. And so we knew that the approach we were taking for MERS was very likely to work for any other coronavirus. We had a blueprint to follow, if you will, but we need to have a blueprint for each of the different viral families.
The best approach would be to develop vaccines against viruses from each virus family, he said. This way, even when the world is exposed to a new virus, it can genetically sequence it to find family and use a single template.