From EurekAlert
September 3, 2020
Zika virus infection during pregnancy can cause severe abnormalities in the fetus, including malformations such as microcephaly. In a small proportion of cases, the disease may lead to miscarriage and perinatal death. A network of more than 30 Brazilian researchers set out to find the causes of these problems with the support of FAPESP and obtained important results after half a decade of hard work. A paper describing their findings has been published in the journal Science Signaling.
“We show for the first time what happens in the fetal brain affected by congenital Zika syndrome [CZS],” Helder Nakaya, who is the last author of the paper, told Agência FAPESP. Nakaya is a bioinformatics specialist, a professor at the University of São Paulo’s School of Pharmaceutical Sciences (FCF-USP), and a senior scientist at the Center for Research on Inflammatory Diseases (CRID), which is one of the Research, Innovation and Dissemination Centers (RIDCs) funded by FAPESP.