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have developed to study how host genes react to Ebola in the lab, will speed up drug
and vaccine development.
Three research centers collaborated on the project: the University of Washington in
Seattle, the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Rocky Mountain Laboratories in
Montana and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
After studying mice with different genetic features, the team found the severity of the Ebola
infection and rates of death seemed to line up with specific gene patterns.
Earlier studies of people infected with Ebola have found that the diversity of reactions is
not necessarily due to the virus itself but factors in the host: some completely resist the
infection, others have a mild to moderate reaction, while those who are most
susceptible succumb to bleeding, organ failure and shock.
But what was missing in order to explore what might explain this diversity of responses
was a reliable animal model that could be used in a safe and secure lab. The
researchers behind the new study showed that the strains of mice they have developed
meet this need.
They took a genetically diverse group of inbred mice that had been developed to
study genes involved in influenza severity and used them to breed strains that
replicate the main features of human Ebola hemorrhagic fever.
In the NIH lab in Montana - which complies with federal, state, and local safety and
biosecurity regulations - they studied mice infected with a mouse version of the Ebola
strains that are currently infecting humans in the 2014 West Africa epidemic.