A 'SIGNIFICANT' breakthrough in the battle to beat measles has been made by scientists developing new vaccines, sparking hopes of wiping out the disease for good. American researchers have discovered exactly how a neutralising antibody can block the highly contagious virus . They explained that when the measles virus meets a human cell, the viral machinery unfolds to reveal key pieces that allow it fuse itself into the host cell membrane.
Once the fusion process is complete, the human cell is a "goner" and it belongs to the virus. Scientists at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) in Califorina are working to develop new measles vaccines and therapeutics that stop this fusion process. They recently used an imaging technique called cryo-electron microscopy to give a detailed picture of how a powerful antibody can neutralise the virus before it completes the fusion process.
Measles causes more childhood deaths than any other vaccine-preventable disease, and it's also one of the most infectious viruses known LJI Professor Erica Ollmann Saphire said: "What's exciting about this study is that we've captured snapshots of the fusion process in action. "The series of images is like a flip book where we see snapshots along the way of the fusion protein unfolding, but then we see the antibody locking it together before it can complete the last stage in the fusion process. "We think other antibodies against other viruses will do the same thing but have not been imaged like this b.
