Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Move Closer To a Universal Flu Vaccine
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Vaccines for most diseases typically work for years or decades but with the flu, next fall it will be time to get another dose. Now Carl Zimmer writes that a flurry of recent studies on the virus has brought some hope for a change as flu experts foresee a time when seasonal flu shots are a thing of the past, replaced by long-lasting vaccines. 'That's the goal: two shots when you're young, and then boosters later in life' says Dr. Gary Nabel, predicting that scientists would reach that goal before long: 'in our lifetime, for sure, unless you're 90 years old.' Today's flu vaccines protect people from the virus by letting them make antibodies in advance but a traditional flu vaccine can protect against only flu viruses with a matching hemagglutinin protein. If a virus evolves a different shape, the antibodies cannot latch on, and it escapes destruction. Scientists have long wondered whether they could escape this evolutionary cycle with a universal flu vaccine that would to attack a part of the virus that changes little from year to year so now researchers are focusing on target antigens which are highly conserved between different influenza A virus subtypes. 'Universal vaccination with universal vaccines would put an end to the threat of global disaster that pandemic influenza can cause,' says Dr. Sara Gilbert."
Didn't stop the TB/MMR jabs.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
My understanding is that the Common Cold is based on six virus families, so a similar approach for each family could create a set of vaccines to eliminate colds.
So could we kill off all the 'typical' flu viruses allowing the evolution of something more aggressive?
That's not how evolution works.
Under the assumption that it is possible for a flu virus to easily mutate these particular antigens which appear to highly conserved (which is not a given...no matter how many people you run over with a bus, humans are not going to evolve immunity to buses), then it does not necessarily follow that the new strain would be more aggressive. This new strain could, in fact, very well be a much milder version. If these antigens are highly conserved, it's probably a part of what makes influenza evolutionarily successful. An adaptation that allows it to replicate and spread optimally. If true, and we attack these vectors, we're essentially changing the game such that the virus is now forced to have an adaptation which would have been less successful in the wild, in an environment without the vaccine.
After all, think about it. We didn't create more aggressive strains of polio or chickenpox once we created vaccines against those viruses. Instead, we pretty much annihilated those diseases.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
It also means there's no selective push against it.
The is quite possibly a good reason we don't create immunities to that target site - possibly because there are beneficial internal fauna that use similar proteins (including, possibly, phages that kill threatening bacteria), or we ourselves have something that would also be targeted.
I strongly suspect such a vaccine will have NASTY side effects. The problem is, you cannot unvaccinate.
I don't believe that it is an accurate representation, but have you seen the BBC show Survivors? I doubt it will spread like it did in that show (because I doubt we'd use such an inoculation method, or be as careless), but I could see a similarly unpleasant result to those who get vaccinated.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
The Seasonal Flu vaccines of today are an enormous headache for the pharma industry. Profit margins are extremely tight, they have politicians crawling up their ass constantly, and every other year during a slow news day some report decides to do an "expose`" that drives people in hordes to get vaccinated, driving up demand (but not price) and then even more politicians crawl up their asses to ask them why they aren't "doing enough" Don't get me wrong, drug companies suck... but flu vaccines are definitely not part of their evil plan. They will welcome this as much as the rest of us.
Because the common cold is actually over 100 different strains from at least 3 different virus families. After a cold, you develop protective immunity to that strain, but there are so many other strains circulating that its just a matter time before you get infected by a "new" (to you) strain. There is development on vaccines which will carry the conserved regions in the cold viruses, but it's a MUCH bigger task.
That's a crock of shit, sir. Every time you vaccinate, you challenge the immune system, and you bring it to a state of readiness for the next attack. It's only people whose immune systems are naive to the invader that actually come down with the disease. That's the whole fucking point of vaccination!
I don't care if your daughter dies. I don't care if her 90-year-old grandparents die. I do care if I come down with a case of whooping cough from a carrier like her.
Fortunately, I won't have to worry about that for another 10 years, because a lot of people have wrongly thought that pertussis was one of those diseases of the 60s/70s that had been wiped out by vaccination, and forgot that there was a booster shot available. Some antivax fucktard cow orker of mine infected three of us and knocked my team's productivity down for a month.
I suspect that we'll just have to kill a lot of fuzzy little animals in order to find out if those binding sites are specific to pathogens or whether they show up elsewhere...
Incidentally, if you want a category of vaccines that seems like it is just begging for dramatic trouble, how about Immunocontraceptives? Already used with success in a variety of nuisance mammals; but uneconomic for use in smaller, more numerous, or harder-to-catch pests(because it has to be injected to work). So, logically enough, work is ongoing to produce virally delivered vaccines that will spread themselves through the target population!
Exactly. Look at what the pharma industry did with smallpox, polio and rinderpest. They spent millions of dollars and decades of research to come up with something which would permanently take care of these issues and look at the money which is flowing into them now that they've done so.
Just think how much more they could have made had they come up with something that needs to be administered year after year. The amounts would be staggering.
These pharma folks must be idiots to come up with a vaccine that prevents something once and for all rather than just doling out temporary fixes.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower