Natalie Mazur, MD PhD (Department of Pediatrics) has received a Junior Investigator Grant of 200,000 euro from the Dutch Longfonds to investigate how the RS-virus infects people and if a cheap, and easy to apply vaccine would be able prevent such an infection.

Physician-researcher Natalie Mazur hated seeing all those stuffy babies in the hospital. All the while, there is a vaccine against the RS virus. Unfortunately, it is very expensive. So she came up with a plan. "The virus enters through the nose, so you have to stop it there. For her research, Natalie received the Junior Investigator grant from Longfonds.

The RS virus

It often starts with sniffling and coughing. For adults, it stays at that. But in children, the RS virus can lead to severe pneumonia. 'In the Netherlands, some two thousand children end up in the hospital every year, two hundred of whom require ventilation in the ICU. Worldwide, seven hundred children actually die every day,' says Natalie Mazur. 'That's because in some countries the hospital is far away. Or there's not enough breathing equipment.' The good news: there is a vaccine. That lowers the chance of hospitalization by 50 to 80 percent. 'But that is so expensive that many countries cannot afford it. Even in the Netherlands, the drug is not reimbursed for most children. A hospitalization is cheaper.'

In recent years, Natalie Mazur worked as a doctor in the pediatric ward of the UMC Utrecht and in hospitals in Malawi and South Africa. With her own eyes she saw how much misery the RS virus causes. 'It is already a nasty experience for babies and children to be in hospital. Especially if you are also stricken with pneumonia, and especially if you have to be on a ventilator. Hospitalization also causes a lot of worry for parents. Imagine your child - sometimes a baby less than a year old - eventually dying because the hospital doesn't have enough resources to do anything about it.

Little toe

Natalie decided to take action and came up with a solution. 'With the existing vaccine, children get a shot every winter. Pretty crazy, because the drug enters your little toes through such a puncture. While the virus enters through the nose. It makes more sense to stop the virus there. This can be done with a nose drop given every day during the winter of a child's first year of life. That drop does its work immediately in the right place. With it, you help children produce antibodies that work immediately. This is how you prevent infection with the RS virus. Furthermore, it hurts less than a prick. Moreover, you need less of the nose drop. That makes this vaccine much cheaper: you save 99 percent on costs.

Testing on adults

Natalie incorporated the vaccine into diluted nasal drops. Now she will test her plan. "From animal research, we already know that the drug also protects against the RS virus in nasal drop form. Now we want to find out if the same is true in humans. But we cannot test the drug on children, because even a vaccine can have side effects. We don't want to expose children to that. That's why we are looking at what happens in healthy adults. They first receive the vaccine through the nose and then we infect them with the RS virus. That way we can see within a few weeks whether the vaccine protects them against the virus.

Faster and cheaper

This method of testing, in which people are given a small dose of a virus to test whether a vaccine works, is fairly new in science. 'This allows us to find out whether a different method of administration and a different dose of the drug also work well. This is done under strict control, of course. Because it's fast, there is no need for years of research on large numbers of people. That saves a lot of money and time. So I expect that in the future researchers will be able to use this method to make more and more vaccines and drugs faster and cheaper. This summer we will begin our first tests for the RS virus. My dream is that there will be nose drops within a few years. So that children around the world will soon have an affordable vaccine that is easy to use.'