"First Universal Flu Vaccine to Enter Phase 3 Trial" - Ashley P. Taylor
For decades, scientists have been trying to develop a universal flu vaccine that would protect people against seasonal flu for years, and also against pandemics, which emerge when viral strains completely novel to people’s immune systems start spreading. For the last several years, Florian Krammer, PhD, associate professor of microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and his colleagues have been developing vaccines against the stalk part of hemagglutinin. But they found that when they immunized animals with vaccines containing the entire hemagglutinin protein, the resulting antibodies tended to target only the head. So instead they’ve designed so-called chimeric hemagglutinin proteins to include in vaccines, where the head comes from one variety of hemagglutinin and the stalk from a human influenza A subype. When they vaccinated animals twice over the course of a few weeks using vaccines that included chimeric hemagglutinin proteins with identical stalks but different heads, the immune system produced many more antibodies against the stalk common to both flu strains than to the heads.
— Florian Krammer, PhD, Associate Professor, Microbiology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai