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."
Because I'm currently sneezing my brains out...
So could we kill off all the 'typical' flu viruses allowing the evolution of something more aggressive?
I will not be on bleeding edge of this. The recent track record of the drug and vaccine approval process has been pretty sorry, let some other guinea pigs live with it a few years first.
No good deed goes unpunished.
So if a one season shot makes your shoulder sore for four or five days, this will....?
--- Mercutio was right.
(From TFA, emphasis mine)
"Several of these have now been taken into clinical development, and this review discusses the progress that has been made, as well as considering the requirements for licensing these new vaccines and how they might be used in the future."
It just wouldn't be a slashdot story if 'intellectual property' didn't pop up somewhere, now would it?
exercise and vitamins and good food.
Best antidote yet known.
Nature finds a way. It sounds too good to be true, and it sounds like it's a researcher casting around for a grant.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
sterilize people?
A co-worker suffered paralysis on his left side and was in the hospital for near over a month. Since then he has gone to a nutritionist for vitamin boosters and other therapy, including having all his metal fillings replaced with ceramic and though he has recovered well enough to regain movement in his left side, he will suffer in pain for the rest of his life
All this from a flu shot.
Research been showing more problems than prevention from vaccines? http://curezone.com/art/read.asp?ID=12&db=12&C0=735
Consider the feedback loop. In response to our actions, the flu itself will change.
We're already seeing how microbes are developing resistance to antibiotics, and how germs acquired during healthcare are more virulent than those out there in the wild.
Do we want to incentivize the flu to mutate into something more vicious and fast-acting?
Sometimes, mother nature represents a balance between extremes. Somewhere between no-flu and a flu that resembles airborne superfast Ebola is the current balance.
I am not saying we should not explore this technology, but with our current record, we should move cautiously.
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.
Flu virus changes are consequences of our immunity latching onto the parts which change. The parts that doesn't change doesn't change because they don't undergo any evolutionary pressure - once you are through with illness, you have antibodies which successfully prevent its return, for the season, all that without aiming at those "unchanging" parts of virus. Once we start targeting them, they too will start changing.
Overall, it will be an interesting experiment, but I doubt it will be as useful remedy as hoped.
What "sorry" track record? Last I checked we've been doing quite well with vaccines. I managed to get into a trial for one of the more recent ones, Chickenpox, and am certainly glad I did. Why are you so worried?
I never catch the flu because I go out of my way to avoid contact with all humans. No need for a fancy vaccine and best of all, free of charge.
Having said that I was laid out for two days solid by this year's flu vaccine and really would like to see a better one.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
This just in! Nature moves closer to a flu immune to the "universal" vaccine.
End of line..
IT is not possible to have a single flu shot. As the influenza virus mutes all the time, each year a group of self-declared experts mix a batch of crap to fight what they "predict" will be the strongest strains. Since the strains change all the time there is never going to be ONE vaccine as the vaccine has to change.
If you think that they are going to create a super vaccine to replace all others from now to the end of time you probably "wanted to make history and voted for the fool".
At the time I was playing field games all year, could easily run five miles, and was getting a very good diet. I was in bed for 10 days with the 76 flu. I later learned that with many viruses the exact opposite of what you claim is the truth - plenty of exercise results in muscle cell damage which makes it easier for the virus to enter them, so athletic people can suffer worse than sedentary people. Poliomyelitis is another one that can do this.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Vaccination has been around since the 19th century and smallpox has returned as a major killer...oh not it hasn't. In fact there were discussions some years ago about whether it was right to keep ANY smallpox virus at all in the world for research. (In case the North Koreans or the North Americans were developing a resistant strain).
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The DOD's anthrax vaccine scandal comes to mind. Funny how the owner of Biport, a big Clinton donor, was able to get his plant reopened after the FDA closed it.
Yes a tiny number of people have died of vaccines. Have you any idea of how many would have died without them?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
A universal cure for all virii, both known and unknown could be acheived
by changing the genetic code used by human (host) cells. This would
cause an invading virus to be mis-replicated and therefore harmless to
the remaining, uninvaded cells.
There is a species of bacteria which partially implements this tactic for
the purpose of surviving bacteriophages (a bacteria-attacking virus).
Such a change would ideally done temporarily just in case there are
side effects.
there's a fundamental problem with all these vaccines, which is summed up flippantly as "what doesn't kill ya makes ya stronger". many people - many of them doctors - recognise that letting their kids happily play in the dirt encourages their immune systems to go into overdrive - not just because of the regular influx of dirt but also because of the happiness.
by vaccinating children against various disease - by giving their immune systems an "easy ride" - their immune systems simply do not develop to the same extent that a child would if they had the actual disease and had to fight for their life.
the very first time we fight for our lives - for our right to live - is when we are born. we *literally* fight for breath, when being sqeezed out of our mums. vaccinations ESPECIALLY ones that are enforced on us by governments are removing our right to fight for our lives, and they're bringing up generation after generation of adults that have immune systems that simply haven't been properly developed at an early age.
the long-term effects on entire populations leaves me deeply concerned.
no doubt there will be plenty of people reading this who will be outraged. they will try to tell me "how could you possibly sit there and write or believe such absolute shit? if it was YOUR child, you would not be so cocky" and the answer is "yes i would. i would sit by my daughter's bed-side, nursing her patiently back to health, loving her and being happy with and for her. because happiness and *not* giving in to the 'shit' is exactly what life is all about."
and no, we have *NOT* vaccinated our daughter. the reports on the detrimental effects and case studies on the long-term health of children are out there; they're just not widely published because a) governments don't want to spread the very panic that they created and spread in the first place b) there's too much money to be made from mass-produced vaccines.
in the 1960s there was a "foot & mouth" outbreak in the UK. nobody slaughtered any cows. they just went "oops, i've got a sore on my lip, oh dear i'd better keep away from people and not kiss them", and the herds were isolated and that was the end of it.
fast-forward 40 years and we have mass panic *and* we have mass-vaccinations. with the masses having their immune systems weakened *because* of the mass-vaccinations, is it any surprise that they go into hysterics, spread the news all over the internet in real-time and accelerate and exacerbate the panic?
so this isn't actually about the actual vaccinations at all. it's about people coping with and adjusting to global instant communications.
How can a vaccine hurt you?
Is that you Jenny McCarthy?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"..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.."
The medics should talk to Dr Alan Solomon, who used to run the successful computer Anti-Virus company "Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit".
He was the one who, when polymorphic viruses came out in the early 1990s, developed the approach for detecting them that all AV companies use today. IIRC, he got a Queen's Award for Technology for this invention.
At the time, many AV companies used to recognise viruses by matching simple bit strings which occurred in the virus code - much the same as detecting the proteins on the surface of a biological virus. Virus writers produced code such as the 'Mutation Engine', which put random 'NOPs' in the code and altered the call sequences, so that every instance of a virus in a computer was a different bit string. Then they started doing whole virus encryption with different keys on each infection. At a stroke, the detection process was subverted.
Alan realised that the virus was 'the same' at some level - not at the bit level, but in terms of its code behaviour. The actual bits would be different for each virus, but a copy of, say, Tequila, would still load two registers, compare and jump at a similar point (that's simplistic, but you get the idea...). So he developed a process for examining a virus, not at the bit level, but in terms of code behaviour. And when he finally sold his company he became a rich man.
I'm sure the same techniques will function in biological viruses - both from the virus attack point of view and the medical defenders. We understand the technique in computers - I hope the medics are sufficiently widely read to be able to apply the work Alan did 25 years ago in a different discipline.....
... and LOL at " Today's flu vaccines protect people from the virus by letting them make antibodies in advance".
So if I don't have the 'vaccines' (plural, remember), then my body can't make antibodies when the actual flu virus is in my body? Why is that then?
http://www.whale.to/v/hadwen1.html
Still waiting for a rebuttal to any of Dr Hadwen's talks. Come on, you've had over a century to do it, why has nobody done it yet?
(Cue moronic Slashdotters spouting 'the party line' about 'vaccination' and getting all defensive. What a joke.)
So not only is it effective against the asian and bird flu's, it also works against Martian, Klingon and Vulcan types.
(And how about The Andromeda Strain ?)
How come they haven't taken aim at the Common Cold?
Or is it that the pharmaceutical companies are making all too much profit from the less-than-threatening cold virus?
Maybe I'm just too jaded.
http://pastebin.com/YBMHMnX7
Should we be concerned about eliminating pathogens that we have co-evolved with and that help build our immune systems (for those of us that aren't killed by them)? Is there an unintended consequence building up here?
Or in other words - what could possibly go wrong?
We have already beaten Chicken Pox or have we.... In recent years people and even children are coming down with Shingles, a fait rarely heard of in early years.
.... a group of rabid, radical evangelicals are planning a boycott because if their children have a greater chance to live, they have a greater chance to have SEX!!!!!
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
All the Conspirator theories and Dick Cheney/Halliburton/Asbestos Conspiracies....
...and queue the opening credit sequence, the soundtrack, and the scenes of the population being mass innoculated before the "rage virus" mutation overtakes New York.
I'm a satanic clam.
Suck it geezers!
Sure, when I was a kid, I'd get it once a year usually, for a day. Never longer. Haven't had it in like 20 years. Not sure what that means, but I do know it means I don't need to get vaccinated for it. Which works, because corporations like to get rid of old stock, which is never good for the flu that is currently going around. And they'll charge you also. boom! you just paid for last years flu vaccine.
Got to love capitalism.
Be seeing you...
This vaccine must be stopped.... immunity to flu will just lead to more people socializing without fear of getting sick, and socializing leads to sex!
Won't someone think of the children? If flu was not keeping those diseased little creatures in check they would be fornicating like bunnies!
A few years- maybe even a couple decades of reduced flu.
Then new versions of the flu which change these sections hit with a vengence.
Hopefully we can rapidly prototype and produce vaccines by then.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The last I heard, this particular universal vaccine does not work very well when injected. The key is to introduce the antigen(s) below the tongue:
The normal flu vaccines are also available as a nasal aerosol.
flu is in general one of the larger killers in the WORLD. Now, if you take out one of the top killers, what will happen? EVERYBODY lives longer. we are looking at a population explosion. a big one. unless we have food/water issues in better shape, we could be trading one killer (disease) for another (war).
It would be nice to see ppl like gates quit focusing on health issues and focus instead on creating new tech such as a thorium nuke generator. Likewise, high speed train that can replace many roads would be smart. why? Because it would help the world over.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This is why they should have nothing to do with it. It should be solely the job of public sector professionals (being PUBLIC HEALTH and all), working on nothing else - say boner pills - but vaccine production and research; all well-funded and isolated from horseshit from any part of the political spectrum.
Some things are far more important that filthy lucre, air-headed 'stars', and pissing contests: preventing pandemics should be chief among them, FFS.
There is already a universal virus killer in development. And it doesn't target the virus. Instead it targets the cell hosting the virus. When a cell is virus infected it makes a specific protein, a "help I'm infected" RNA flag.
DRACO is two proteins bound together. When it sees the "help I'm infected" RNA, it breaks in two. Half of DRACO binds to it. The other half is a protein messenger that triggers apoptosis - cell death.
The end result is that any cell that has a virus in it commits suicide before the virus can use the cell to reproduce.
Here is a quick story on DRACO.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I would love if a virologist could chime in: Why don't our bodies immune systems' already develop the ability to "target antigens which are highly conserved between different influenza A "?
The average human is exposed to many many type of influenza in their lifetimes, how does this vaccine work to prime it in a way that wouldn't normally happen during the course of a regular influenza infection? Why will this specific vaccine technique potentially work to provide broad immunity, but exposure to wild type influenza does not?
The M2 protein was targeted already in a trial vaccine. Paradoxically, most of the "test subjects" died with much worse reactions when they were actually exposed to the flu virus.
Anyone want to step forward and volunteer to try this one?
Scientists have found some people that already have antibodies targeting these conserved areas. The problem is that immunity is very very random due to the recombination mechanisms (such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%28D%29J_recombination) which are used to match a diverse set of possible antigens. The body produces a wide variety of antibodies, the production of which is either negatively reinforced (such as in the case of self-recognition) or positively reinforced (i.e. when they match some foreign antigen). An infection triggers a local cytokine reaction (inflamation) which triggers a rapid ramp up in the production of any and all antibodies by cells that happen to be in the local area. The body can produce unbelievably many different antibodies that can match any given invading virus or bacteria, so once someone is vaccinated or infected there's a sort of race condition to see which of the candidates becomes established as the winner*. The winner then becomes positively reinforced and its memory cells are circulated throughout the body, while the losers mostly just go back to being inactive. Most people just aren't lucky enough to have an antibody for one of the conserved regions win (since those are such a small fraction of all of the candidates that would work for this particular infection).
TLDR: Don't believe what you see on TV and everything is much more complicated and messy than it seems.
*Well to be fair, it is much more complicated than this with possibly slight increased partial immunity based on all matching antibodies based on the distribution of the corresponding cell lines in the body, local cytokine levels, antigen density, etc.
See Dr. Joel Fuhrman: http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/cold-flu-flu-and-nutrition-dr-fuhrman-responds-to-comments.html ..."
"The idea that a person eating a nutrient-rich diet is just as likely to develop and suffer the dangerous consequences from an influenza virus as a cheese burgers and soda eating American is simply wrong. More importantly such opinions are dangerous as they may lead to tragic outcomes for those mistaking authority for knowledge. Let's review just a few articles from the scientific literature that further support this concept that nutritional.excellence can offer protection from viral attacks. I will show the reference and post some explanatory comments below each reference.
Numerous citations there.
Also, on vitamin D:
And: http://www.naturalnews.com/029760_vitamin_D_influenza.html
Counter-evidence on vitamin D though:
http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/02/health/vitamin-d-colds/index.html
But elsewhere it's been said by Dr. John Cannell that vitamin D has only helped with some influenza strains and also by compairson that the amount in the previous study may still have been too low:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/news-archive/2009/h1n1-flu-and-vitamin-d/
Can you provide any substantial evidence to back up your claims to the contrary? Can you even cite any good evidence the flu vaccine to date has accomplished anything significant except put more aluminum in people's bodies? By contrast: ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/11/does-the-vaccine-matter/307723/
"But what if everything we think we know about fighting influenza is wrong? What if flu vaccines do not protect people from dying -- particularly the elderly, who account for 90 percent of deaths from seasonal flu? And what if the expensive antiviral drugs that the government has stockpiled over the past few years also have little, if any, power to reduce the number of people who die or are hospitalized? The U.S. government -- with the support of leaders in the public-health and medical communities -- has put its faith in the power of vaccines and antiviral drugs to limit the spread and lethality of swine flu. Other plans to contain the pandemic seem anemic by comparison. Yet some top flu researchers are deeply skeptical of both flu vaccines and antivirals. Like the engineers who warned for years about the levees of New Orleans, these experts caution that our defenses may be flawed, and quite possibly useless against a truly lethal flu. And that unless we are willing to ask fundamental questions about the science behind flu vaccines and antiviral drugs, we could find ourselves, in a bad epidemic, as helpless as the citizens of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.
Jackson's findings showed that outside of flu season, the baseline risk of death among people who did not get vaccinated was approximately 60 percent higher than among those who did, lending support to the hypothesis that on average, healthy people chose to get the vaccine, while the "frail elderly" didn't or couldn't. In fact, the healthy-user effect explained the entire benefit that other researchers were attributing to flu vaccine, suggesting that the vaccine itself might not reduce mortality at all. Jackson's papers "are beautiful," says Lone Simonsen, who is a professor of global health at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., and an internationally recognized expert in influenza and vaccine epidemiology. "They are classic studies in epidemiology, they are so carefully done."
The results were
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Given the track record of the seasonal influenza vaccines I wish them luck in their pursuit. The current batch of vaccines for influenza are really poor in effectiveness to the point of "why bother".
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD001269/vaccines-to-prevent-influenza-in-healthy-adults
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD005187/influenza-vaccination-for-healthcare-workers-who-work-with-the-elderly
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD004879/vaccines-for-preventing-influenza-in-healthy-children
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD004876/vaccines-for-preventing-seasonal-influenza-and-its-complications-in-people-aged-65-or-older
While I wish them luck I have my doubts that a fast changing virus that comes from several source animals aside from humans will be resolved this way.
One thing that really bothers me is that they only have to beat a placebo to get approved. This is true for drugs as well as vaccines. While that is a good place to start the bar should be much higher if we want to continually improve things (i.e. the Demming method). Any new medical intervention should have to be better (safer and/or more effective) than existing interventions. In this case they would have to be better than existing vaccines and other interventions like vitamin D3.
Then we will see real progress.
After modern medicine catches up with research on the role of friendly flora in the digestive tract, as that's where most of the immune system is.
Trusting Big Pharma with your future is as stupid as trusting Monsanto with the food supply. Big corporation care about the bottom line, and the best way to assure constant escalating profits is with a perpetual cycle of crisis that they can address FOR profit.
If you trust the FDA and the medical community, you haven't been paying attention the last 35 years.