Scientists from the Albert Einstein School of Medicine have developed a new potential vaccine for Herpes simplex virus 2 (HSV-2). The vaccine contains live attenuated HSV-2, which completely lacks glycoprotein D and thus cannot spread from cell-to-cell.
Jacobs et al. show that mice that had been treated with the weakened virus as a vaccine were completely protected from a later infection with wild-type HSV-2 and did not develop any symptoms of the disease.
Herpes simplex virus 2 infects millions of people worldwide and is the leading cause of genital diseases. There is no cure for HSV infections and there are currently no vaccines that would prevent the virus from infecting humans. The group hope that with further work, these findings may eventually lead to a preventative treatment to combat HSV-2 infections in humans.
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