Super-Vaccine For Flu In Development

Adam9 tipped us to a DailyMail article about the possibility of a revolutionary flu vaccine that could work against all strains of the Influenza A disease. This 'holy grail' of vaccines would work on everything from the annual 'winter flu' to the 'bird flu'. The best part is that just a few vaccinations may provide complete immunity, unlike the annual boosters are current defenses require. From the article: "The new jabs would be grown in huge vats of bacterial 'soup', with just two pints of liquid providing 10,000 doses of vaccine. Current flu vaccines focus on two proteins on the surface of the virus. However, these constantly mutate in a bid to fool the immune system, making it impossible for vaccine manufacturers to keep up with the creation of each new strain. The universal vaccines focus on a different protein called M2, which has barely changed during the last 100 years."

Comments

Re:Do fix-alls really exist?

[TaoPhoenix]

Believe it or not, this is a scorching topic in the Business Case Study area.

Auto makers tried the Made-To-Rattle approach in the 1970's and nearly got wiped out. The Japanese realized that there are quite a lot of people to sell to ONCE, and selling their cars once was better than Detroit not selling anything at all.

The "Temporary Patch" mentality is the kind of thing people can trick themselves into from desperation. One of my old professors once said, "Suppose your customer wants to spend $100,000 with you. You get better results if you pass on cost savings; last year's $100,000 audit can be delivered this year for $75,000. But your customer "wants" to spend the same budget they always had - so just sell them some exciting new services."

Occasionally greedy companies can act to block something "too good", but nimble smaller groups by concept have to stake their claim at being better than the behemoth.

To reel this into SlashDot, If I'm gonna have you as an IT guy, quit patching my Windows box. Convert me to Linux. : ) And tell Tux to stop glaring at me.

It's in the Mail, it's almost certainly snake oil

[Alioth]

The Daily Mail is probably one of the most ignorant newspapers published in Britain, read by reactionary permanently offended right wing little Englanders (the audience to which it panders). Unfortunately, if the report's only in the Daily Mail, it's almost certainly wrong in every important detail. The Mail is one of the least credible papers in Britain.

Claims on Effectiveness

[The Step Child]

From the article:

The universal vaccines focus on a different protein called M2, which has barely changed during the last 100 years.

The main question that comes to my mind is how they can claim that this vaccine will require only a booster shot every 10 years. The drug rimantadine is believed to act by inhibiting the M2 ion channel - however, drug resistance can develop if the M2 gene has a chance to mutate. Presumably, mutations that render "anti-M2" vaccines ineffective are also possible, perhaps not necessarily in the same range of probability (one could argue that mutations are far less likely when the virus is faced with the immune system versus a drug). However - especially at the population level - could placing selective pressure onto the M2 gene lead to resistance faster than the company anticipates? I suppose time (and human trials!) will tell :)

Flu Virus Proteins

[reverseengineer]

The two proteins noted as being the current targets for flu research are hemagglutinin and neuraminidase- these are the "H" and "N" that influenza viruses are classified by (like H5N1 for the modern strain of avian flu of much concern). Hemagglutinin plays a major role in attachment of the flu virus to the host cell, while neuraminidase promotes viral release from infected cells. These have been the focus of most flu research because the body usually has strong antigenic responses to them.

M2 happens to be an ion channel protein for the flu virus, which is also necessary for propagation of the virus (it's thought to be involved breaking down the virus protein coat once inside the host cell, freeing the genetic material to be replicated). As the article notes, it tends to be more conserved than H and N- there may be a severe disadvantage for a flu virus to have a mutant strain of M2.

What the article does not mention, however, is that there are a couple of antiviral drugs already available which target M2. Amantidine and rimantidine both are thought to interfere with M2, and are already administered as antivirals against flu. (Curiously enough, they started as Parkinson's treatments- it was discovered patients taking them had serendipitous flu resistance). While a vaccine meant to target M2 might work differently than the adamantane-based antiviral drugs, it's worth noting that influenza, and H5N1 flu at that, resistant to those drugs is already quite common throughout Southeast Asia.

Re:Is a cure enough?

[Dunbal]

yet TB - a totally curable disease - still kills more people than 'flu.

      Umm, where did you get THAT little snippet of misinformation?

      TB is not totally curable - in fact we are seeing a huge increase in multi-resistant strains of this bacillus. You have to take up to 6 different antibiotics (rifampin, isoniazid, ethambutol, pyrazinamide, streptomycin and pyridoxine) and supplements during up to 6 months or more. There is poor compliance with the treatment, which makes this a disease that is very hard to cure. I would also argue that although TB and its complications might directly kill more people (the death rates are similar in the US, 0.6 per 100,000 for TB and 0,4 per 100,000 for influenza), the consequences of influenza - especially in the elderly, are usually devastating for quality of life and prognosis purposes.

Smallpox etc seems to have been handled pretty well, yet TB

      Also I must point out that smallpox is caused by a virus, while TB is a very slow growing bacterium. Not the same critter at all.

Re:Eugenics

[Fallen Mongoose]

Everyone is born immune to virii as they don't exist. Viruses however are a different story.

Vaporware??

[rlp]

I am not a molecular biologist, but this blog entry suggests that this may be vaporware.

Re:Is a cure enough?

[TheRaven64]

TB is bacterial and has no vaccine Every child in the UK is given the BCG vaccine against TB at school. Each school is visited for a few days every few years and every pupil in a certain age range is injected unless their parents opt them out. Before the widespread vaccinations took place, up to 25% of annual deaths were caused by TB (although typically the figure was closer to 10%). Now, less than 50 people die of it in the UK each year; it is effectively extinct here. A vaccination against the flu would likely have similar effects of the proliferation of the disease.

Re:unchanged protein

[CTachyon]

the change could happen as a direct result of the new vaccine because the very nature of viruses forces them to evolve for survival, OR it could happen as a completely unrelated event (happening simply because it was already time for this particular protein to naturally evolve)

There's no such thing in nature. Proteins don't "decide" to evolve, and DNA doesn't "decide" to mutate. All evolution happens because of random mutations in DNA -- random in terms of where the mutation is, what the mutation does, and when the mutation occurs -- followed by the proliferation (or not) of that mutation due to natural selection.

(There are some minor exceptions to the randomness of mutation, such as alternative mRNA splicing and certain regions of DNA that trip up the replication process, but they can be ignored for this discussion.)

In the case of influenza, mutations happen at an extremely rapid rate: the influenza genome is made of single-stranded RNA (no backup copy) and is copied by a viral transcriptase without the aid of any proofreading enzymes (no verification happens when copies are made). This means that the average mutation rate is roughly 1 per virus, on average. That's an insane mutation rate -- moreso since the genome of any RNA virus is almost 100% genes -- and it only works because influenza creates so many copies of itself in each infected cell.

Now, not knowing anything about the M2 protein's history except for what's in the article, the fact that the M2 protein has remained nearly the same for the last 100 years -- despite all these rapid mutations -- means that the dominant M2 protein is being strongly selected for. That means that viruses with a different M2 don't spread very well, as compared to viruses with the most popular M2. This suggests that, even if a newer vaccine causes the immune system to target only the currently popular M2, the viruses that escape the vaccine will be less effective than any influenza strain of the last 100 years.

(Of course, "worse for influenza" doesn't necessarily equate to "better for humans". It could be that the reason the current M2 is so popular is that it doesn't kill as many human hosts as the older M2s, which benefits both humans and influenza. But, given what the Wikipedia article says about M2's function, the smart money is that switching to the older M2 will impede the virus's ability to infect a cell, which is a win for humans.)

Re:correlation != causation

[Rolgar]

It's breastfeeding.

From La Leche League's website: Breastfeeding has been shown to be protective against many illnesses, including painful ear infections, upper and lower respiratory ailments, allergies, intestinal disorders, colds, viruses, staph, strep and e coli infections, diabetes, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, many childhood cancers, meningitis, pneumonia, urinary tract infections, salmonella, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome(SIDS) as well as lifetime protection from Crohn's Disease, ulcerative colitis, some lymphomas, insulin dependent diabetes, and for girls, breast and ovarian cancer.

Re:They did have a cure for flu

[Anonymous Coward]

On a more serious note, here are some vital resources about the flu:

• White House on Pandemic Flu
• PandemicFlu.gov
• FluWikie

If you don't do anything else, read John Barry's The Great Influenza.

Re:Is a cure enough?

[MightyYar]

Sorry, you are correct - there is a TB vaccine. I had forgotten all about that. However, it doesn't really work very well (especially in adults) and interferes with TB testing. In the US, they only recommend the vaccine to certain health care workers and other high-risk folks, but many of them get it anyway. We have a high incidence for a developed country because we have so many immigrants - incidence in foreigners is something like 9 or 10 times higher than in the US-born population. We also have large numbers of people living in homeless shelters, prisons, and nursing homes. These crowded facilities are full of people with weak immune systems, and the disease spreads relatively quickly. Even then, the incidence is something like 14,000 new cases of active TB a year, which is really quite low in a country of 300 million. Deaths number in the hundreds (700-ish?), so we're doing just about as well as the UK I think, with their 350 or so in a population of 61 million :)

All that said, there are several new vaccines undergoing trials right now, so hopefully one will be more effective in adults.