Sarven Sabunciyan was intrigued.
He had been reading about xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus, or XMRV, a virus never before seen in humans. But according to attention-grabbing studies in PLoS Pathogens and Science, it was now showing up in people with prostate cancer and chronic fatigue syndrome.
Sabunciyan, a pediatric neurovirologist in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, studies the role of viruses in psychiatric diseases and behaviors. He decided to see if people with schizophrenia also had XMRV, a finding that would yield important clues about the mental disorder and how to treat it.
His first step was to find people who had been exposed to the virus. Sabunciyan’s team developed a test that could detect antibodies that XMRV would have left behind. “Even if you recover from an infection, you would retain some antibodies,” he explains. But no sign of the antibody could be found in blood samples of people with or without schizophrenia.