UW-Madison: Researchers begin work on Zika virus

CONTACT: David O’Connor, 608-301-5710, dhoconno@wisc.edu; Thomas Friedrich, 608-265-3381, thomasf@primate.wisc.edu

MADISON – In October, when David O’Connor last visited Brazil as part of a decade-long research program studying drug-resistant strains of HIV, one of his Brazilian collaborators had a request.

“He asked about using some of the technologies we have developed to look for new viruses to study some unusual cases of a birth defect, microcephaly, in the north of Brazil,” says O’Connor, a University of Wisconsin-Madison pathology professor.

The babies born with underdeveloped brains and small heads were the relatively quiet beginning of worry over the spread of Zika virus, concern that has grown louder outside Brazil with an international outbreak and emergency attention from public health officials around the world.

“At the time we didn’t know it would explode into the public consciousness like it did,” O’Connor says. “But we did start planning.”

That planning will soon culminate in some of the first experiments studying Zika virus in monkeys, conducted by a broad UW-Madison team that includes the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center and expertise in infectious disease, pregnancy and neurology.

Read more at http://news.wisc.edu/uw-madison-researchers-begin-work-on-zika-virus/