Flu vaccine breakthrough

Influenza virus, A/Hong Kong/1/68

Yesterday, when commenting on Bill Gates' vaccine efforts, I wrote that a key breakthrough might be "an influenza vaccine that targets a conserved region of the virus, which would eliminate the need for costly annual vaccinations."  As if on cue...

The Guardian reports of an influenza vaccine breakthrough out of Oxford University. The new vaccine, developed by Dr Sarah Gilbert's team, targets proteins inside the flu virus that are common across all strains. The two proteins, Nucleoprotein and matrix protein 1, are more than 90% conserved across all influenza A strains and less liable to change over time.

In their initial human trial of 11 healthy vaccinated people and 11 non-vaccinated people, they exposed them to what I think is A/Wisconsin/67/2005 (H3N2). Fewer vaccinated people got the flu and vaccinated people had more T-cells and more activated T-cells. We will have to wait a bit for more details, since they have just submitted the paper for publication. Interesting that the Guardian is reporting this before a a medical journal. Given how dysfunctional the peer-review process is these days (STAR-ICU trial anyone?), I don't blame them for communicating the results in this time-efficient manner.

You can read about the initial vaccine creation and phase 1 safety trial of the Modified Vaccinia virus Ankara vector encoding nucleoprotein and matrix protein 1 in the January 1st CID.

Guardian article by Alok Jha

Berthoud et al Clin Infect Dis, January 1, 2011