Scientists Found Single Influenza Vaccination Protects From unsafe Disease

Studies are now needed to confirm that the vaccine will work in case of humans.

A sign lets customers know they can get a flu shot in a Walgreen store in Indianapolis.

“This is really cutting-edge technology”, Antonio Lanzavecchia, immunologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and unaffiliated with the studies, told Science.

In monkeys, the vaccine provoked a high level of antibodies and significantly reduced fever following infection with the H1N1 virus, which is far less deadly than bird flu but highly contagious.

“If the body can make an immune response against the HA stem, it’s hard for the virus to escape”, Wilson said. Rather, they are laying a foundation upon which future vaccines can be created.

The Financial Times reported that Sarah Gilbert, a vaccine expert at the University of Oxford, cautioned that while the studies are “an exciting development” it may still take several years of research to see how well they work in humans. These protein nanoparticles kept the stem intact and made it easy for the immune system to spot once it was injected.

But two teams of American researchers have reportedly run successful trials focusing on the stable part of the virus that causes the flu, which could eliminate the need for a yearly vaccine, according to BBC News.

The work is published in Science journal and Nature Medicine.

Those numbers may seem small, but put another way, among about 1 million elderly persons living in nursing homes each year, a 50-percentage point increase in the match rate for a flu season would save the lives of 2,560 people and prevent 3,200 hospitalizations.

This past flu season, the vaccine chosen was not that good of a match for some of the different strains that circulated. That would happen if H5N1 bird flu started spreading in people.

The team demonstrated with electron microscopy and X-ray crystallography that their most promising vaccine candidate mimicked the hemagglutinin stem, allowing antibodies to bind with it in the same way that they would with a real virus.

“This study shows that we’re moving in the right direction for a universal flu vaccine”, Ian Wilson, professor of structural biology and chair of the department of integrative structural and computational biology at The Scripps Research Institute, said in an institute news release.

The two studies are focused on the stem component of the virus,”It’s a major reconstruction of the molecule”, Dr. Gary Nabel, one of the authors, said in a statement. It’s present on all subtypes of influenza, providing a key viral “machinery” that enables the virus to enter cells.

Both experiments have discovered a way to target the parts of the virus that remain constant across all strains, the Press Association reports.