Scientists have taken a step closer to developing a single influenza vaccination that can protect against any form of the fast changing and dangerous disease.
Two separate international teams taking different approaches have come up with similar results. In both cases animals inoculated against one strain with the new kind of vaccine were also protected against another flu strain.
The findings were important enough to have been published simultaneously on Monday afternoon in two top scientific journals, Science and Nature Medicine.
Scientists based at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases in Maryland writing in Nature Medicine used mice and ferrets to confirm that a vaccine prepared against one strain of flu could also prevent influenza-induced death from other strains of the virus.
Researchers in the Janssen Centre of Excellence for Immunoprophylaxis in Netherlands and California and the Scripps Research Institute in California publishing in Science tested their vaccine in mice and monkeys. This vaccine also protected the animals from death after exposure to two strains of flu.
The flu virus evades treatment because of frequent mutations which render older vaccines obsolete.
Last year’s vaccine did not work well because it did not match up well against the version of influenza that was in circulation.
Both teams used a part of the viral surface that was less likely to mutate year on year, allowing the one vaccine work well against different strains.
A working universal influenza vaccine is still a long way off, the scientists note. It has to be proven to be safe for humans and then shown to be effective against all forms, not just the H1N1 and H5N1 flu strains used by these researchers.
Even so the news was welcomed by other experts in the field.
“This is an exciting development, but the new vaccines now need to be tested in clinical trials to see how well they work in humans,” said Prof Sarah Gilbert, professor of vaccinology at the University of Oxford.
“This will be the next stage of research, which will take several years. So we are still some way from having better flu vaccines for humans.”
