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Dengue virus

Bumps in the road to therapeutic antibodies

Nature volume 524, pages 295–296 (2015)Cite this article

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A human antibody against dengue virus serotype 2 has been shown to protect mice against disease. Structures of the antibody bound to the virus illuminate how it binds different viral forms to prevent virus entry into cells.

Dengue viruses are mosquito-borne flaviviruses that circulate as four related serotypes. Around 400 million human dengue virus infections occur across the globe annually. Roughly 25% of these result in clinical symptoms ranging from a self-limiting fever to a potentially fatal vascular-leakage disease1. Despite this disease burden and decades of research, no effective vaccine or therapeutic agent is available. To redress this, much research has focused on understanding how antibodies bind to dengue virus particles and inhibit infection, because the presence of neutralizing antibodies is thought to correlate with protection following vaccination, and such antibodies hold promise as antiviral drugs2. Writing in Science, Fibriansah et al.3 show that the monoclonal antibody 2D22 binds multiple envelope proteins on the surface of the virus particle in a manner that prevents the conformational rearrangements necessary for virus entry into cells.

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Figure 1: Surface structure affects antibody binding.

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  1. Leslie Goo and Theodore C. Pierson are in the Laboratory of Viral Diseases, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892, USA.,

    Leslie Goo & Theodore C. Pierson

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  1. Leslie Goo
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  2. Theodore C. Pierson
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Correspondence to Theodore C. Pierson.

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Goo, L., Pierson, T. Bumps in the road to therapeutic antibodies. Nature 524, 295–296 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/524295a

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