Two hopeful attempts to get the universal flu vaccine

2015/08/25 Galarraga Aiestaran, Ana - Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Medikuntza
• Mikrobiologia
• Farmakologia

Researchers should design the flu vaccine every year, as the virus was rapidly mutating. In this way, each season is vaccinated according to the variant that has prevailed, but the vaccine does not give maximum protection, since as the season advances the virus is mutating, so the vaccine is losing effectiveness. To avoid this, both groups have identified the part of the virus that did not mutate and developed vaccines based on it.

Both have focused on the protein called hemagglutinin, H used in the designation of influenza viruses (H1N1, H5N1...). This protein consists of two parts: the head and trunk. Although the mute head, the trunk is very stable and is similar in all viral variants. For this reason, the researchers have tried to make vaccines based on the trunk. However, these vaccines are very weak: without head, the trunk falls and the antibodies are not tied.

Both groups differ in the strategy used to overcome this problem. One of the groups, published in the journal Nature Medicine, has introduced a combination of mutations to stabilize the trunk of hemoagglutinin and has reinforced it with a nanoparticle to remain where necessary. For its part, Science has reorganized and put in the end the subunits of the trunk through another combination of mutations, which has been enough to stabilize the structure.

At the moment, only animal tests have been conducted. Both have obtained very good results in the mouse and quite good in other animals. In particular, the nanoparticle based vaccine has been tested in twins and the other in monkeys, and it is noteworthy that the test has been done with a variant of deadly flu with H5N1.

Therefore, they still have much to do to overcome the effectiveness of the vaccine that is currently used, but at least they have taken important steps in achieving the universal vaccine.