Development of vaccines for Marburg hemorrhagic fever

Abstract

Marburg (MARV) and Ebola viruses (EBOV) emerged from the rainforests of Central Africa more than 30 years ago causing outbreaks of severe and, usually, fatal hemorrhagic fever. EBOV has garnered the lion’s share of the attention, fueled by the higher frequency of EBOV outbreaks, high mortality rates and importation into the USA, documented in such popular works as the best-selling novel ‘The Hot Zone’. However, recent large outbreaks of hundreds of cases of MARV infection in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola with case fatalities approaching 90% dramatically highlight its lethal potential. Although no vaccines or antiviral drugs for MARV are currently available, remarkable progress has been made over the last few years in developing potential countermeasures against MARV in nonhuman primate models. In particular, a vaccine based on attenuated recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus was recently shown to have both preventive and postexposure efficacy.

Keywords::

• Filoviridae
• filovirus
• Marburg hemorrhagic fever
• Marburg virus
• pathogenesis
• vaccines

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Jon Towner for assistance with the interpretation of Marburg virus phylogenetics and Lina Moses and Kaori Tanaka for assistance with the manuscript preparation.

Opinions, interpretations, conclusions and recommendations are those of the authors and are not necessarily endorsed by the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, the US Army, or the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. The authors are grateful for the contribution of many in the field whose work was cited in this article.