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Paramyxoviruses: biology & pathogenesis

Published on August 29, 2024   43 min

A selection of talks on Infectious Diseases

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0:00
Hello. My name is Benhur Lee. I'm a professor of Microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Today, we're going to talk about paramyxoviruses, their biology and pathogenesis with a special emphasis on Nipah virus, a dangerous and virulent pathogen that you'll hear about today.
0:25
Set the stage. This is the outline of the topics I'll cover in today's talk. I will start with an introduction to put the paramyxoviruses in context. Then I'll talk briefly about the zoonotic nature and virulence of Nipah virus which belongs to a group of viruses called Henipavirus. Then I will mention the general characteristic features of paramyxoviruses and in so doing talk about the targets for therapeutic interventions and drug development. Lastly, I will end with talking about Henipavirus receptor usage, how it gets into certain cells and how that is related to its pathogenesis.
1:12
To put it in context, paramyxoviruses are one of the most contagious viral pathogens that infect humans. As you can see from the table below, these are the various diseases that most people may have heard of and we think that you know the immediately past pandemic SARS-CoV-2 was quite bad and scientists characterize how contagious an agent is by the R_0 value. This is the basic reproductive number which quantifies the contagiousness or transmissibility of infectious pathogens. As you can see down there at the bottom of the list, SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 are about 2-5. The big 1918 pandemic influenza is also about 2-5. Ebola that was all over the news was only about 1.5-2.5. But looking at measles and mumps, which are the prototypical paramyxoviruses that most people have heard of have extremely high R_0 values. In fact, measles was thought to be the most contagious viral pathogen that we know of and that's why we study paramyxoviruses and especially Nipah. Currently, Nipah virus has an R_0 of less than one which means that it's likely not to result in an epidemic. But if it ever evolves to have a high R_0, we would be in big trouble because Nipah viruses are much more deadly than measles and mumps.

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