A major breakthrough in the battle to beat measles has been made by scientists working to develop new vaccines. Researchers have discovered exactly how a neutralising antibody blocks the highly contagious virus. They explained that when the measles virus meets a human cell, the viral machinery unfolds in just the right way to reveal key pieces that let it fuse itself into the host cell membrane.
Once the fusion process is complete, the host cell is a "goner" and it belongs to the virus. Scientists at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) in California are working to develop new measles vaccines and therapeutics that stop the fusion process. They recently harnessed an imaging technique called cryo-electron microscopy to show - in unprecedented detail - how a powerful antibody can neutralise the virus before it completes the fusion process.
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 before.
" The research team say their "promising" discovery, published in the journal Science, may prove important beyond measles as it is just one member of the larger paramy.