Characterization of Sudan Ebolavirus infection in ferrets

// Andrea Kroeker 1, 2 , Shihua He 1, 2 , Marc-Antoine de La Vega 1, 3, 4 , Gary Wong 1, 5 , Carissa Embury-Hyatt 6 and Xiangguo Qiu 1, 2 1 Special Pathogens Program, National Microbiology Laboratory, Public Health Agency of Canada, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada 2 Department of Medical Microbiology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada 3 Department of Immunology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada 4 Département de microbiologie-infectiologie et d’immunologie, Université Laval, Quebec City, Québec, Canada 5 CAS Key Laboratory of Pathogenic Microbiology and Immunology, Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China 6 Canadian Food Inspection Agency, National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada Correspondence to: Xiangguo Qiu, email: xiangguo.qiu@phac-aspc.gc.ca Keywords: ferrets, Sudan, Ebolavirus, animal model, characterization Received: October 05, 2016 Accepted: March 30, 2017 Published: May 08, 2017 ABSTRACT Sudan virus (SUDV) outbreaks in Africa are highly lethal; however, the development and testing of novel antivirals and vaccines for this virus has been limited by a lack of suitable animal models. Non-human primates (NHP) remain the gold standard for modeling filovirus disease, but they are not conducive to screening large numbers of experimental compounds and should only be used to test the most promising candidates. Therefore, other smaller animal models are a valuable asset. We have recently developed a guinea-pig adapted SUDV virus that is lethal in guinea pigs. In our current study, we show that ferrets are susceptible to wild-type SUDV, providing a small animal model to directly study clinical isolates, screen experimental anti-SUDV compounds and potentially study viral transmission.