Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post.Using the blood of a 56-year-old woman vaccinated against measles, scientists have isolated a fighting force of four potent virus-blocking antibodies that could pave the way toward a treatment for people exposed to the highly contagious respiratory disease making a comeback in the United States.A safe, highly effective vaccine for measles has been available since the 1960s, and the U.S. officially eliminated the disease in 2000, with sporadic cases and outbreaks. But dropping vaccination rates have sparked large outbreaks in multiple states, and the country is edging closer to the virus spreading freely again-which puts more people at risk.AdvertisementAdvertisementNew ways to block or treat measles would be particularly important for people who are immunocompromised and babies under the age of 1, because they are not eligible for the vaccine, leaving them unprotected amid a growing number of cases.“Measles was a problem that was solved. Until it wasn’t solved anymore,” said Erica Ollmann Saphire, president of the La Jolla Institute for Immunology who led the study published Thursday in the journal Cell Host & Microbe. But she and other scientists stressed that this approach was not a substitute for a vaccine.“The treatment is always going to be more expensive than the vaccine. It’s the best bang for your public-health buck – this is for people that couldn’t be vaccinated,” Saphire said.The new work is a basic science study. In rodents, the experimental antibodies knocked down the amount of virus in their lungs when given one to two days after infection. If further testing and refinement show the approach is safe and effective in people, it could be used after exposure – analogous to giving antivenom after someone has been bitten by a venomous snake, Saphire said, or as a preventive therapy similar to the RSV antibody used to protect babies.A ‘solved’ virus that still holds mysteriesToday, when scientists want to create countermeasures against a new virus, they deploy an arsenal of sophisticated tools to decode the 3D shape of the proteins that viruses carry on their surface. Those surface proteins can act like homing devices and molecular crowbars that allow viruses to break into cells.AdvertisementAdvertisementS …
