One step closer to a vaccine for a common respiratory disease

RSV is a common cause of respiratory infection, but there is no vaccine available. It causes flu-like symptoms in healthy adults, but becomes life-threatening in young children and the elderly. It is estimated to cause over 100,000 deaths yearly worldwide.

The teams of Research Director Sarah Butcher (Institute of Biotechnology, University of Helsinki) and Professor Ari Helenius (ETH Zurich) have now solved the three-dimensional structure of RSV.

"The structural model helps us to understand how infectious viruses are formed. This information can be useful in the intelligent design of vaccines" said the researcher Lassi Liljeroos.

RSV is related to measles and mumps viruses. All three viruses parasitize human cells, stealing parts of the cell membrane to use as their own. In RSV the resulting virus membranes look likes tubes and spheres. We could show that the virus' matrix protein controls this shape.

"In addition, we observed that the fusion protein on the surface is in two different forms. The fusion protein is responsible for attaching the virus to human cells and invading them. This is an important finding because the fusion protein is the key molecule in developing therapeutic antibodies to the virus. "

This publication is part of Lassi Liljeroos' Ph. D. thesis where he has earlier studied measles virus. The research was supported by the Academy of Finland, the Sigrid Juselius Foundation, the Viikki Molecular Biosciences Graduate Programme, the European Research Council, and the European Molecular Biology Organisation.