Universal flu vaccine

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Aussie breakthrough in the hunt for a universal flu vaccine...

Australian Team Edges Closer to Universal Flu Vaccine
March 13, 2013 — Researchers in Australia say they have made a breakthrough in the hunt for a universal flu vaccine, by finding a way to better protect against new strains of the virus. Around the world, annual seasonal influenza epidemics cause hundreds of thousands of deaths each year and many more bouts of serious illness.

The “hit men of the immune system”, known as T-cells, could be the key to a universal flu vaccine, according to Australian scientists. Their research involving scientists at the University of Melbourne, Monash University and the Netherlands focuses on how the influenza virus normally evades these white blood cells that protect the body from infection. They hope that understanding how the virus evades T-cells will lead to the creation of a vaccine that recognizes distinct virus strains. Such vaccines could provide universal immunity against influenza strains, leading to longer lasting and broader protection against seasonal and pandemic outbreaks.

Stephen Turner, a professor in the department of microbiology and immunology at the University of Melbourne, hopes the research will complement existing flu treatments. “The current vaccine that we have induces a sort of immunity that the virus can evade very easily through mutating itself and changing the targets.” Current flu vaccines cause the body to produce antibodies for specific flu strains. T-cells scan the surface of other cells to look for any hint of infection. However, they are usually ineffective at combating the influenza virus.

Turner says that researchers hope that new vaccines that target T-cells could provide universal immunity against influenza, instead of just a few specific strains. “The problem with it is that the virus can change," Turner stated. "So, what we are looking at here is value-adding to the current vaccine such that we can generate not just the antibody immunity but also this more broadly protected T-Cell immunity in the event that the virus does change without us, sort of, being able to predict it.”

Clinical trials could start within five years. Researchers hope their work into T-cell immunity will also improve their understanding of viral infections such as HIV, Hepatitis C and cancerous tumors. Influenza is an acute respiratory disease. Seasonal epidemics can result in up to five million cases of severe illness around the world each year and as many as 500,000 deaths. Researchers say that a new flu virus can spread across more than 70 countries in just eight weeks.

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Synthetic vaccine doesn't rely on using live infectious virus...

Synchrotron yields 'safer' vaccine
27 March 2013 - Producing vaccines against viral threats is a potentially hazardous business and that's why manufacturers have to operate strict controls to ensure that no pathogens escape.

British scientists have developed a new method to create an entirely synthetic vaccine which doesn't rely on using live infectious virus, meaning it is much safer. What's more the prototype vaccine they have created, for the animal disease foot-and-mouth, has been engineered to make it more stable. That means it can be kept out of the fridge for many hours before returning to the cold chain - overcoming one of the major hurdles in administering vaccines in the developing world.

The research, published in the journal PLOS pathogens, was a collaboration between scientists at Oxford and Reading Universities, the Pirbright Institute, and the UK's national synchrotron facility, the Diamond Light Source near Oxford. Diamond is a particle accelerator which sends electrons round a giant magnetic ring at near light speeds. The electrons emit energy in the form of intense X-rays which are channelled along "beamlines" - into laboratories where they are used to analyse structures in extraordinary detail.

Infectious

Synchrotrons have been used before to analyse viruses at the atomic level, but the technology has advanced considerably to enable scientists to create a stable synthetic vaccine. "What we have achieved here is close to the holy grail of foot-and-mouth vaccines. Unlike traditional vaccines, there is no chance that the empty shell vaccine could revert to an infectious form," said Dave Stuart, Life Sciences Director at Diamond, and MRC Professor of Structural Biology at the University of Oxford. "This work will have a broad and enduring impact on vaccine development, and the technology should be transferable to other viruses from the same family, such as poliovirus and hand-foot-and-mouth disease, a human virus which is currently endemic in South-East Asia."

These human disease threats, like foot-and-mouth, are all picornaviruses. Viruses are inherently unstable and fragile, but picornaviruses can be studied using X-ray crystallography. This enables the protein shell of the virus to be analysed at the atomic level - something a billion times smaller than a pinhead.

Pathogen

 

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Granny says if ya don't wanna catch the bird flu - don't be kissin' onna chickens with a runny nose...

Wikipedia Proves Useful for Tracking Flu
April 18, 2014 ~ Scientists may have figured out the best way yet to track the spread of flu: Watch how many people visit Wikipedia articles about the flu and its symptoms.

Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, say the technique bests the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) estimate of flu levels by up to two weeks. It also bettered Google’s Flu Trends data by 17 percent, researchers said. “Having a timely estimate of what is happening in the population is crucial to being able to accurately plan for vaccines strategies and to coordinate public health and medical personnel,” said Dr. David McIver, one of the study’s authors. “The earlier we are able to know what the flu burden is, the better we will be able distribute resources and limit disease spread.”

A boy gets an influenza vaccine injection at a health care clinic, in Boston, Massachusett

The CDC estimates the flu kills between 3,000 and 49,000 Americans each year. "Each influenza season provides new challenges and uncertainties to both the public as well as the public health community,” the team wrote in a statement. “We're hoping that with this new method of influenza monitoring, we can harness publicly available data to help people get accurate, near-realtime information about the level of disease burden in the population." To come up with their data, researchers McIver and Dr. John Brownstein, “calculated the number of times certain Wikipedia articles were accessed every day from December 2007 to August 2013.”

According to McIver, they looked at 35 Wikipedia articles in total, including several that were meant to act as beacons of normal website traffic, such as the Wikipedia Main Page. The researchers said their model worked well during “severe” flu seasons as well as during the outbreak of H1N1in 2009.

While the data proved speedy when predicting the spread of flu, McIver doesn’t think it should replace data from the CDC or Google. “It would be tough to say that this data is better than CDC data - they are very different sources of information,” he said. “All methods of estimating flu activity have their pros and cons. The best tool for measuring this type of disease burden will probably end up being a system that combines different types of data together, to get a greater overview of what is really happening in the population.” The study was published in PLoS Computational Biology.

Wikipedia Proves Useful for Tracking Flu

 

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Now there's a flu vaccine patch...

Needle-Free Flu Vaccine Patch Works as Well as a Shot
Jun 28 2017 - A press-on patch that delivers flu vaccine painlessly worked as well as an old-fashioned flu shot with no serious side effects, researchers reported Tuesday.

People who tried out the patch said it was not difficult or painful to use, and tests of their blood suggested the vaccine it delivers created about the same immune response as a regular flu shot, the team reported in the Lancet medical journal. The hope is the vaccine will be cheaper, easier to give and more acceptable than a regular flu vaccine. “It was really simple. It’s kind of like a band-aid almost,” said Daisy Bourassa, a college instructor who tested the new vaccine for the study. “It’s not like a shot at all. If I had to describe it is maybe like pressing down on the hard side of Velcro. It is like a bunch of little teeny tiny stick things that you can feel but it’s not painful.”

The team at Georgia Tech, and a spin-off company called Micron Biomedical, have been working on the patch vaccine for years. This was the first test using real flu vaccine, and the results show it caused immune responses very similar to those elicited by vaccine administered by syringe. “There were no treatment-related serious adverse events,” Dr. Nadine Rouphael of the Emory University School of Medicine and colleagues wrote in their report. It was a phase 1 trial, meant mostly to show safety in just 100 volunteers. That’s not enough to show whether the vaccine actually prevented any cases of influenza. That will take a larger trial to demonstrate. “The results were great,” Rouphael told NBC News. “We were pleased to see that the immune response was excellent.” Rouphael’s team were the experts in vaccinating, and were recruited by the Georgia Tech team to actually test the experimental patch.

The tiny needle-like points on the patch are made out of the vaccine itself. When pressed into the skin, the needles dissolve, delivering the dried vaccine into the outer layer of the skin. This layer is loaded with immune system cells that are the first line of defense against invaders such as bacteria and viruses. These cells take up the vaccine and use it to prime themselves against a flu infection. The trial showed that people could use the patch without any help and liked it. It also showed they had an immune response to the patch, and did not have any serious side-effects from using it. If it continues to work well in tests, Rouphael said it might be possible to just let people buy the vaccine patches and take them home to use.

They’ll be much easier to ship around the country and the world than current vaccines, which must be carefully refrigerated. Bourassa is a fan of the idea. “I think it would be fantastic if this was something you could get and administer it yourself at home,” she said. “The reason why many years I don’t get a shot is that I don’t have time to wait in a line or whatever. It would be really awesome if I could order it and it would be delivered like Amazon Prime.” Biomolecular engineering professor Mark Prausnitz of Georgia Tech, who leads the team developing the patch vaccines, said the vaccine stayed stable for as long as a year at temperatures up to 100 degrees F. Conditions like that would completely spoil a regular flu vaccine. “It is also really neat how you can keep it at room temperature,” Rouphael said. “It really simplifies the way we do vaccines. This could be a game-changer.”

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