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14 September 2010Journal of Clinical Investigation
Scientists 'clone' human cytomegalovirus
Scientists have successfully cloned a human cytomegalovirus offering new hope for the treatment of potentially life-threatening diseases.
Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is a major infectious cause of congenital malformations worldwide. The virus is also known to cause life-threatening disease in transplant patients and people with HIV/AIDS.
The development of new treatments has been hampered as scientists have been unable to stably replicate HCMV outside the human body. Scientists from Cardiff University's School of Medicine have now created an exact copy of the virus outside oft he body. This `clone´ will help virologists to develop antivirals and vaccines against the virus.
Richard Stanton from Cardiff University's School of Medicine who led the joint research, said: "HCMV has by far the largest genome of all viruses affecting humans - consequently it was technically difficult to clone in an intact form in the laboratory.
The scientist cloned a copy of the virus from a strain isolated by Cardiff Public Health Laboratories and identified the genes causing the instability of the virus outside the body.
"Following the identification of these genes, we have successfully developed cells in which we can grow virus that corresponds to that which exists in the human body," said Richard Stanton
Following the study, the clone has already been distributed to research laboratories worldwide, and is being tested by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as part of a study to develop an international diagnostic standard with which to compare clinical isolates.
The study, published in the The Journal of Clinical Investigation and funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council, was a joint collaboration between Cardiff University's Infection, Immunity and Inflammation Interdisciplinary Research Group and Drs Davison and Dargan at the Centre for Virus Research at the University of Glasgow.
J. Stanton, Katarina Baluchova, Derrick J. Dargan, Charles Cunningham, Orla Sheehy, Sepehr Seirafian, Brian P. McSharry, M. Lynne Neale, James A. Davies, Peter Tomasec, Andrew J. Davison, Gavin W.G. Wilkinson: Reconstruction of the complete human cytomegalovirus genome in a BAC reveals RL13 to be a potent inhibitor of replication, J Clin Invest. 2010 Sep 1;120(9):3191-208. doi: 10.1172/JCI429.
