A newly-developed influenza vaccine could provide protection for as much as 88% of all known strains of the virus with a single dose, the international team of researchers behind the breakthrough reported in a recent edition of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Bioinformatics.
Dr. Derek Gatherer of Lancaster University and colleagues from Spain and the UK said that the universal vaccine would be effective against 88% of known flu strains globally. In addition, they said that a second, US-specific vaccine could cover 95% of that country’s known flu strains.
“Every year we have a round of flu vaccination, where we choose a recent strain of flu as the vaccine, hoping that it will protect against next year’s strains. We know this method is safe, and that it works reasonably well most of the time,” Dr. Gatherer explained in a statement.“However, sometimes it doesn’t work – as in the H3N2 vaccine failure in winter 2014-2015.”
Even when they do work, such vaccines are often “immensely expensive and labor-intensive,” he said. They often provide “no protection at all against potential future pandemic flu” similar to the so-called “Spanish flu” of 1918 and as well as the pandemics of 1957 and 1968, which ultimately led to the deaths of millions of people.
Success ‘within reach’ as scientists look to start proof of concept tests
In fact, according to the World Health Organization, annual modern flu epidemics resulted in as much as an estimated 500,000 deaths worldwide each year, the researchers said. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” Dr. Gatherer said. He and his colleagues set out to design a vaccine which would be able to provide “much broader and longer-lasting protection,” he added.
Using their knowledge of the influenza virus and the human immune system, Dr. Gatherer and a team of colleagues from Aston University in Birmingham, UK and Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Complutense University of Madrid) in Spain used computers to help design a new type of vaccine made of components that would give near-universal protection against the flu.
They set out to provide protection against both influenza A (avian flu) and influenza B (a strain known to affect only humans and seals) by activating immune cells known as the CD8+ and CD4+ T cells against specific regions of the influenza genome. The result was a pair of new vaccines, one of which provided population protection coverage (PPC) of over 96 in the US and the other which had a PPC rating of 97 against all global forms of the disease.
What this essentially means, co-author Dr. Pedro Reche of Complutense University explained in a statement, is that “a universal flu vaccine is potentially within reach. The components of this vaccine would be short flu virus fragments – called epitopes – that are already known to be recognized by the immune system. Our collaboration has found a way to select epitopes reaching full population coverage.”
“Epitope-based vaccines aren’t new, but most reports have no experimental validation. We have turned the problem on its head and only use previously-tested epitopes. This allows us to get the best of both worlds, designing a vaccine with a very high likelihood of success,” said Dr. Darren Flower of Aston University. The researchers are now hoping to recruit a pharmaceutical industry partner to help them synthesize the vaccine for a lab-based proof-of-concept experiment.
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