Research
A vaccine for horses (ATCvet code: QI05AA10) based on killed viruses exists; some zoos have given this vaccine to their birds, although its effectiveness is unknown. Dogs and cats show few if any signs of infection. There have been no known cases of direct canine-human or feline-human transmission; although these pets can become infected, it is unlikely they are, in turn, capable of infecting native mosquitoes and thus continuing the disease cycle. AMD3100, which had been proposed as an antiretroviral drug for HIV, has shown promise against West Nile encephalitis. Morpholino antisense oligos conjugated to cell penetrating peptides have been shown to partially protect mice from WNV disease. There have also been attempts to treat infections using ribavirin, intravenous immunoglobulin, or alpha interferon. GenoMed, a U.S. biotech company, has found that blocking angiotensin II can treat the "cytokine storm" of West Nile virus encephalitis as well as other viruses.
In 2007, the World Community Grid launched the Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together project. This uses a distributed network of volunteers' computers via the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing to perform computer simulations of interacting molecules. Thousands of small molecules are screened for potential antiviral properties with respect to West Nile and related viruses.
NIAID is supporting a number of WNV vaccine approaches. One of the earliest began in 1999 when NIAID funded a fast-track project by Acambis, Inc., to develop a candidate live, attenuated, “chimeric” WNV vaccine. The vaccine was constructed using the DNA/genes of the licensed yellow fever 17D vaccine virus as the backbone. For the WNV vaccine, researchers substituted certain genes (the premembrane (prM) and envelope (E) surface protein genes) of WNV for the prM and E genes of the yellow fever vaccine virus using chimeric technology that was originally developed at NIAID during the early 1990s.
Read more about this topic: West Nile Virus
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