Since the discovery of the first henipavirus in 1994, much progress has been made in henipavirus research, from identification of functional cellular receptors to the development of novel diagnostics, vaccine and therapeutics [15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25] . By contrast, there is little understanding of the pathogenesis of these highly lethal viruses. This is due in part to the requirement of a high security BSL4 facility for any live infection studies and in part to the limited range of research tools and reagents for the current small animal models. Research into the mechanisms of henipavirus pathogenesis is also hampered by the lack of related, but non-pathogenic or less pathogenic viruses, thus preventing targeted comparative pathogenetic studies.