And you should talk to your vet about
the flu vaccine designed for canines.
The study focused on
a flu vaccine designed to protect against an unusual strain that originated in pigs and caused a pandemic in 2009.
The finding could ultimately help improve
flu vaccine design: Because it takes time to manufacture vaccines and inoculate the public, scientists must choose which strains to target many months before the year's flu season begins.
Not exact matches
The
flu vaccine contains a cocktail of three or four strands of either the inactivated influenza virus or particles
designed to look like those viruses to your immune system.
Armed with that information, the researchers then
designed a mutant
flu strain that was powerful enough to replicate well but highly susceptible to our body's own ability to control the virus — the ideal ingredients for a
vaccine.
An international team of scientists have
designed a new generation of universal
flu vaccines to protect against future global pandemics that could kill millions.
Based on our knowledge of the
flu virus and the human immune system, we can use computers to
design the components of a
vaccine that gives much broader and longer - lasting protection.»
Studies that compare
flu alterations in multiple people won't immediately tell researchers how to
design vaccines, she says, but could point to parts of the virus for further investigation.
Flu vaccines are
designed to prevent infection by eliciting antibodies against HA, which the virus uses to break into cells lining the airways.
Most attempts have been
vaccines designed to make us produce antibodies, aimed not at
flu's surface proteins, but at internal proteins that are the same in all
flu viruses.
These findings improve understanding of the mechanisms that make
flu outbreaks so difficult to prevent, and inform efforts to
design more effective
flu vaccines that are less easily thwarted by continual mutation.
Every year, public health officials survey the three
flu subtypes circulating in humans and
design a
vaccine for the next winter season that covers them all.
«We think we can use our molecular, rational
design approaches to make a better
flu vaccine for people who really need it,» says study leader Andrew Pekosz, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Currently, seasonal
flu vaccines are
designed to induce high levels of protective antibodies against hemagglutinin (HA), a protein found on the surface of the influenza virus that enables the virus to enter a human cell and initiate infection.
Learning more about the new strains could help public health officials to determine which drugs might be effective and to
design new
vaccines for the next
flu season, which will likely include strains that are now circulating.
How much protection the annual
flu shot provides depends on how well the
vaccine (which is
designed based on a «best guess» for next season's
flu strain) matches the actually circulating virus.
More importantly, Gack found that avian, swine, and human
flu viruses block TRIM25 to evade immune defense by RIG - I, unraveling a molecular target for the
design of antiviral drugs and
vaccines.
Many researchers at NIH, universities and medical schools are looking for antibodies that act on a broad range of
flu strains, with the goal of understanding how they attach to the viruses and then
designing vaccines or other
flu therapies that produce a similar effect.