Influenza is a highly infectious airborne disease with an important societal burden. Annual epidemics have occurred throughout history causing tens of millions of deaths. Even a run-of-the-mill influenza infection can be debilitating to otherwise healthy people, and lethal to those who are elderly or frail, so vaccinations are important. Because of seasonal antigenic drift and antiviral resistance of the virus there is a critical need for the development of new and novel vaccines and antiviral drugs. In vivo optical imaging has emerged as a powerful, non-invasive tool to track viral load and therapeutic efficacy of vaccines and immunotherapies in small animal models.
Read how researchers at the NIH, NIAID, Emory University, and University of Wisconsin used the IVIS® optical imaging platform to successfully quantify and track viral load in mice and demonstrated that vaccine of human mAb administration has a protective or therapeutic effect in mice challenged with the influenza virus.