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Monkeypox virus, vaccines, and therapeutics

Published on August 29, 2024   42 min

A selection of talks on Infectious Diseases

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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.

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