Bagga receives award for RSV research

Bindiya Bagga, MD, received the Caroline B. Hall Clinically Innovative Research Award for the manuscript “Unrecognized prolonged viral replication in the pathogenesis of human RSV infection” in Journal of Clinical Virology. This award is presented annually to a junior researcher who is a first author on a manuscript that best illustrates Dr. Caroline B. Hall’s innovative approach to clinical research.

RSV respiratory symptoms continue long after the virus is no longer detected in culture. Bagga, DeVincenzo, and colleagues hypothesized that prolonged undetected RSV replication is responsible for these symptoms. Thus, the authors examined RSV replication in healthy adult volunteers inoculated with the Memphis 37 strain of RSV-A. RSV was absent in culture 5-6 days after infection. However, qPCR detected RSV an average of 8.9 days after infection. These findings provide a potential explanation for the extended manifestation of RSV respiratory symptoms. The results also indicate a wider window of opportunity for amelioration of clinical disease.

B. Bagga, L. Harrison, P. Roddam, and J.P. DeVincenzo. Unrecognized Prolonged Viral Replication in the Pathogenesis of Human RSV Infection, Journal of Clinical Virology, Volume 106, September 2018, Pages 1-6, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcv.2018.06.014