02. März 2015 Progress in Ebola research

Heinrich Pette Institute, Leibniz Institute for Experimental Virology: New mouse model generated to improve research into Ebola infections Hamburg. The current outbreak of Ebola in West Africa has shown that many questions about this infectious disease remain unanswered. To improve their understanding of the Ebola virus, the course of the Ebola infection and suitable therapies, scientists have to work with suitable animal models. A team of researchers headed by Dr. César Muñoz-Fontela of the Heinrich Pette Institute, Leibniz Institute for Experimental Virology, has now succeeded in generating a mouse model on the basis of which scientists will be able to study the infection even better. The current outbreak in West Africa has illustrated the devastating consequences of an Ebola epidemic and how little we know about the symptoms and the course of the disease. To enable measures and therapies to be developed, studies on suitable small animal models are necessary. In the past, this has been a problem in Ebola research, as the mouse models used in the lab are insensitive to the Ebola virus and could only be infected using virus forms specially adapted to them. However, the working group headed by the Hamburg scientist Dr. César Muñoz-Fontela of the Heinrich Pette Institute has achieved a breakthrough for further scientific work with the Ebola virus. It transplanted hematopoietic cells into mice (human blood stem cells) and in this way developed a mouse model that can also be infected with the natural wild-type virus and used to improve the analysis of the disease and therapies. "The mouse model we have created will greatly facilitate Ebola research in the future and hopefully quickly lead to results that enable further epidemics to be avoided or contained," says Dr. César Muñoz-Fontela of the Heinrich Pette Institute. In a recently published paper in the Journal of Virology, the scientists at the Heinrich Pette Institute together with researchers at the Bernhard Nocht Institute für Tropical Medicine described how an infection with the Ebola virus in the mouse model they have optimized leads to typical symptoms such as viremia, liver damage, hemorrhage and a high fatality rate. This shows that the new small animal infection model is extremely suitable for further studies with the virus. Press contact Dr. Franziska Ahnert, HPI
Tel.: 040/48051-108; Fax: 040/48051-103
presse@hpi.uni-hamburg.de Contact person
Dr. César Muñoz-Fontela
Tel.: 040/480 51-280
cesar.munoz-fontela@hpi.uni-hamburg.de Publication "Ebola virus disease in mice transplanted with human hematopoietic stem cells" J Virol. 2015 Feb 11. pii: JVI.03546-14