Arias Armando, Thorne Lucy, Goodfellow Ian
Division of Virology, Addenbrooke's Hospital, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Elife. 2014 Oct 21;3:e03679. doi: 10.7554/eLife.03679.
Lethal mutagenesis has emerged as a novel potential therapeutic approach to treat viral infections. Several studies have demonstrated that increases in the high mutation rates inherent to RNA viruses lead to viral extinction in cell culture, but evidence during infections in vivo is limited. In this study, we show that the broad-range antiviral nucleoside favipiravir reduces viral load in vivo by exerting antiviral mutagenesis in a mouse model for norovirus infection. Increased mutation frequencies were observed in samples from treated mice and were accompanied with lower or in some cases undetectable levels of infectious virus in faeces and tissues. Viral RNA isolated from treated animals showed reduced infectivity, a feature of populations approaching extinction during antiviral mutagenesis. These results suggest that favipiravir can induce norovirus mutagenesis in vivo, which in some cases leads to virus extinction, providing a proof-of-principle for the use of favipiravir derivatives or mutagenic nucleosides in the clinical treatment of noroviruses.
致死性诱变已成为一种治疗病毒感染的新型潜在治疗方法。多项研究表明,RNA病毒固有的高突变率增加会导致细胞培养中的病毒灭绝,但体内感染期间的证据有限。在本研究中,我们表明,广谱抗病毒核苷法匹拉韦通过在诺如病毒感染的小鼠模型中发挥抗病毒诱变作用来降低体内病毒载量。在治疗小鼠的样本中观察到突变频率增加,同时粪便和组织中的感染性病毒水平较低,在某些情况下甚至检测不到。从治疗动物中分离出的病毒RNA显示出感染力降低,这是抗病毒诱变过程中接近灭绝的病毒群体的一个特征。这些结果表明,法匹拉韦可以在体内诱导诺如病毒诱变,在某些情况下导致病毒灭绝,为法匹拉韦衍生物或诱变核苷在诺如病毒临床治疗中的应用提供了原理证明。