A cocktail of drugs is what it’ll take to defeat this deadly disease.
Researchers at the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School have discovered an antibody that can attack all four strains of the dengue virus. Having found the DENV-1 antibody in 2012 and the DENV-3 antibody in February this year, they are now currently whipping up a cocktail of drugs that can kill all four dengue strains.
Not only can this new antibody treat dengue before and after infection, but it can also prevent a more severe infection in patients who had been previously infected by other dengue serotypes, TODAY reports.
The antibody will undergo clinical trials in two to three years.
Another team of Duke-NUS scientists also discovered a way to identify DENV-2 strains that may cause an epidemic, which could help health authorities to determine the allocation of manpower to dengue clusters in order to control mosquito populations during an outbreak.
Dengue serotype DENV-2 is one of the two common serotypes in Singapore, and is harder to kill due to its ability to change its structure once it infects the human body, said Associate Professor Lok Shee-Mei yesterday.
Various strains can also emerge within the DENV-2 serotype as the virus mutates, which can spread more easily and infect more mosquitoes, which in turn, infect more humans.
Photo: UDSAgov via Flickr
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