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0:00
I'm Rachel Roper,
Professor of Microbiology
and Immunology at
the Brody School of Medicine
at East Carolina University.
I'm going to talk today about
poxviruses and
specifically, monkeypox,
mpox, the virus,
the vaccines and therapeutics.
0:19
I'd like to first
announce that I do
have a conflict of
interest because I
have some patents for
improved poxvirus vaccines.
0:28
Even though we're focusing
on monkeypox today,
most of the research that has
been done has been done on
smallpox, which was
caused by variola virus,
and it had about a 30%
fatality rate. It's estimated
0:42
to have killed about
500 million people
in the first 75 years
of the 20th century.
Now it's only supposed
to be in two places,
the CDC - Center
for Disease Control
in Atlanta, Georgia and VECTOR,
the former Soviet biowarfare
center in Russia.
1:02
It's still a concern for
bioterrorism both
smallpox and monkeypox.
A special concern
about it now is
that any developed
poxvirus laboratory can
now also synthesize
these viruses using
DNA synthesis and simple
tissue culture techniques.
1:23
Poxvirus structure,
these are very
large brick or
ovoid-shaped, 200 by
300 nanometers, really
large viruses with
a complex structure.
Multiple membranes
surrounding a protein core,
and they have a linear double
stranded DNA genome,
usually around
200,000 base pairs encoding
about 200 proteins.
On the left, you can see the
mature virus particles here
and on the right,
I'll show you more of
the immature virions
in the next slide.
