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I'm Peter Openshaw.
I'm the Professor of
Experimental Medicine
at Imperial College London.
And I've been working on
Respiratory Syncytial
Virus for more years
than I care to remember,
actually, since about 1985.
And what I'm going to do today
is to summarize some of the most
important background about RSV,
talk a bit about animal models
for vaccine development, and
then the current vaccines that
are under development, and
where I think the vaccine
field is going in the future.
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So first a bit about
Respiratory Syncytial Virus.
It was first named the
Chimpanzee Coryza Agent
by a group that had
been studying chimps
and found that some of the
chimp handlers had common colds
and that the chimps
had common colds, too.
It was subsequently renamed,
Respiratory Syncytial
Virus by Bob Chanock,
but I think that the name
is a very regrettable one.
I think that if instead
it had been called,
the "Savage Agent," the
whole history of RSV research
would have been changed.
I've been trying to get the name
changed to the Savage Agent,
but nobody seems to take
this very seriously.
1:10
Respiratory Syncytial Virus, quite
extraordinarily a successful virus.
It's distributed worldwide.
In temperate climates, it tends
to undergo winter epidemics.
So every winter we know
there's going to be
a big outbreak of RSV disease.
And hugely successful in that
it manages to infect about 65%
of children the first year of life.
By the third year,
it up to about 96%.
So virtually everyone gets infected,
and everyone gets reinfected, as well.
So if you take adult volunteers,
you put RSV into the nose,
you tend to again get a common cold.
So that's atypical.
Or most viruses, if you infect
once and then try and infect again,
you won't be successful.
So it's a very intriguing
virus immunologically.
It's usually a mild
disease, but because it
infects so many children,
it's actually a major cause
of hospital admissions.
So in many parts of world,
it's the commonest single cause
of hospitalization during infancy.
And, as I said, it causes about
70% of cases of bronchiolitis.
So in us, it just
causes coughs and colds,
but it's obviously
a danger to younger
children, in that we can transmit
that cough or cold to them.
There's also an association with wheezing,
which I'll talk a little bit more about later.
