Abstract
Human respiratory syncytial (RS) virus is a major cause of lower respiratory tract infections among infants and young children. Globally, 65 million infections occur each year, resulting in 160,000 deaths. Severe lower respiratory tract disease because of RS virus infection predominantly occurs in infants who are two to six months of age. The antiviral compound ribavirin provides some benefits when used to treat children hospitalized with RS virus infections. However, its proper role in pediatric therapeutics remains ill-defined. Three approaches have been used to identify the individual proteins of RS virus that might be involved in generating protective immune responses: (1) the production and identification of monoclonal antibodies to individual viral proteins and their subsequent use in passive immunization trials to determine protective efficacy; (2) the administration of individual proteins isolated by immunoaffinity chromatography or by various physical separation methods, that is, a subunit vaccine approach; and (3) the expression of individual RS virus proteins from live recombinant vectors as a means of synthesizing individual gene products and testing their protective efficacy by vaccination with such vectors.
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