A multidisciplinary team at the University of Alberta has for the first time sought to understand how monkeypox virus may be causing neurological symptoms in people affected by the global outbreak of mpox disease, declared by the World Health Organization in 2022.
In newly published research in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team used laboratory experiments to infect human brain cells with the monkeypox virus. They found monkeypox virus infiltrated the astrocytes — a type of cell responsible for normal brain function — triggering an extreme immune response.
"Astrocytes are the most abundant neural cells in the brain," explains first author Hajar Miranzadeh Mahabadi, a postdoctoral fellow in medicine and holder of a Canadian Institutes of Health Research HIV Trials Network fellowship. "We found that monkeypox virus can efficiently infect these cells and can induce a kind of brain cell death we call pyroptosis."
