Every year the flu kills thousands of people and sickens millions more who didn't get a flu shot or in whom it didn't work well. In 1918, the worldwide death toll from flu topped 50 million and researchers have been worried about a repeat ever since.
Now, a team of government and former government scientists has developed a vaccine that seems – at least in monkeys – to protect against the strains most likely to cause a global pandemic.
The group, which published their monkey results in a Wednesday study, has begun a small trial to test the vaccine in healthy adults.
More than four years ago, the group, led by current and former government scientists, decided to explore a different way of making a universal flu vaccine, which has been a goal for a generation.
"Maybe we couldn't develop a vaccine that would protect against any flu ever, but could we protect against any flu that has caused a pandemic in people?" asked Dr. Gary Nabel, who has helped lead the work at Sanofi, where he was chief scientific officer.
Influenza viruses mutate much faster than the coronavirus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, creating multiple new strains every year. (With the SARS-CoV-2 virus, scientists have been calling them variants, rather than strains, because they're not as different from the original.)
A vaccine designed to combat the flu strains circulating in the Southern Hemisphere's winter might be ineffective by the time the Northern Hemisphere reaches that season, because the circulating strain changes so fast.
But there are parts of the virus that are essential and so remain the same even as it mutates.
Flu viruses, unlike coronaviruses, have a head and a stem. The new vaccine targets where its stem attaches.
In the past, people developing universal flu vaccines started by trying to inactivate the whole live virus, said Nabel, an immunologist and virologist who headed the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and is now co-founder, president and CEO of a startup called ModeX Therapeutics.
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