Researchers in the United States have identified the role of a protein that plays a key role in the progression of Lassa fever, majorly seen in West Africa.

Lassa fever is an acute viral hemorrhagic infection, similar to Ebola, that infects people by contact with contaminated food or other products contaminated with infected rats' urine or faeces. Despite the fact that it has a 15% mortality rate in severe cases, up to 90% in pregnant women, and causes deafness in a quarter of survivors, there is no vaccine or antiviral to guard against Lassa virus.

To save lives, researchers at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) and Scripps Research are studying how the Lassa virus multiplies within human hosts. The researchers reveal how a crucial Lassa virus enzyme termed polymerase drives infection by harnessing a cellular protein in human hosts in a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Future medicines could target this relationship to treat patients, as their findings.

"There is no antiviral medicine that particularly targets Lassa virus," says first author Jingru Fang, a graduate student at LJI and Scripps Research. "That is why researchers must find possible druggable sites on this virus to prevent infection." The Lassa virus only encodes four viral proteins. The polymerase, for example, directs the process of virus genome replication and gene expression to produce the components needed for the virus to propagate to new host cells. If virus polymerase can be stopped, infection can be stopped.

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