Australia and US team up to Tackle MERS

Associate Professor Senanayake, an infectious disease specialist at the Australian National University, said MERS-CoV posed a similar threat to Ebola.
"We went to a lot of trouble planning for Ebola, which was very sensible, but potentially the risk of getting MERS in Australia is even higher," he said on the Sydney Morning Herald.
However researchers from the Australian Institute for Bionengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN) in Brisbane are already onto the job, as they prepare to develop an antibody against the growing global threat of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV).
The project is a collaboration with US researchers based at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, as announced by Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk.
MERS is a serious respiratory illness caused by a coronavirus similar to the virus that causes SARS. It is fatal in 30 to 40 per cent of cases. (MERS) has recently struck South Korea and has already caused seven deaths, seen over 2500 people quarantined, and 1800 schools to be shut.
AIBN director Professor Gray said “MERS and other emerging diseases pose a serious global threat, which is why a collaborative effort from some of the world's best researchers is urgently needed." He and his team look forward to the challenge of developing the antibody.
“While there haven’t yet been any on-shore cases of MERS-CoV in Australia, it’s an infectious disease and many Australians travel to or originate from countries that are affected.”
The UQ team will work with international researchers, including Dr Dimiter Dimitrov from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who, along with Professor Chris Broder, was co-developer of the anti-Hendra monoclonal antibody.
Monoclonal antibodies are not vaccines, but are antibodies that are engineered to mimic the antibodies produced naturally by the human body in response to vaccines, or pathogens and other invaders.