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New Antibodies Could Finally Block One of the World's Stealthiest Viruses Epstein-Barr virus has spent millennia perfecting a trick that makes it almost impossible to target: it latches onto nearly every B cell in our immune system, the very cells we’d want to use to fight it. An estimated 95 per cent of people on the planet carry the virus, most of us without ever knowing. For the vast majority, that coexistence is uneventful. But for the immunocompromised, particularly people undergoing organ or bone marrow transplants, EBV can awaken with lethal consequences. Now a team at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle has found a way around the virus’s defences, using mice engineered with human antibody genes to produce the first genetically human monoclonal antibodies that block EBV from entering our cells. The results, published in Cell Reports Medicine, mark a meaningful step toward a therapy that has eluded researchers for decades. The challenge has always been peculiar. To develop antibodies against a virus, you typically need to find immune cells that recognise it. But EBV’s surface proteins, gp350 and gp42, bind to receptors found on virtually all B cells, the very cells scientists would normally sort through to find virus-targeting antibodies. It’s a bit like trying to pick out someone... https://scienceblog.com/new-antibodies-could-finally-block-one-of-the-worlds-stealthiest-viruses/