RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Windows of opportunity for Ebola virus infection treatment and vaccination
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 125336
DO 10.1101/125336
A1 Van Kinh Nguyen
A1 Esteban A. Hernandez-Vargas
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/04/07/125336.abstract
AB Ebola virus (EBOV) infection causes a high death toll, killing a high proportion of EBOV infected patients within 7 days. Comprehensive data on EBOV infection are very fragmented, hampering efforts in developing therapeutics and vaccines against EBOV. Under this circumstance, mathematical models become valuable resources to explore potential controlling strategies. In this paper, we employed experimental data of EBOV-infected nonhuman primates (NHPs) to construct a mathematical framework for determining windows of opportunity for treatment and vaccination. Considering a prophylactic vaccine based on recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus expressing the EBOV glycoprotein (VSV-EBOV), we found that the time window can be subject-specific, but vaccination could be protective if a subject is vaccinated during a period from one week to four months before infection. For the case of a therapeutic vaccine based on monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), a single dose might resolve the invasive EBOV replication even it was administrated as late as four days after infection. Our mathematical models can be used as building blocks for developing therapeutic and vaccine modalities as well as for evaluating public health intervention strategies in outbreaks. Future laboratory experiments will help to validate and refine the estimates of the windows of opportunity proposed here.