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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...
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.
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?
Probably not inconceivable; but there are a couple of points to consider: TFA mentions targeting structures that are 'highly conserved' between different virus subtypes. Typically(and I am not a molecular biologist, so feel free to cringe and/or correct me) the fact that a structure is 'highly conserved' between genetically distinct populations means that it is extremely important for some reason. Mutations happen(and very, very fast in influenza), so regions that aren't life-critical can diverge significantly over time. Life-critical regions, on the other hand, do experience mutations; but most of the mutants die. The degree of conservation across genetic lineages that diverged at a known period in the past can tell you a lot about how important that area is, even if you don't yet know exactly what it does.
Second, while this also doesn't preclude a really nasty bug, it is important to remember that diseases aren't little agents playing Pandemic 2 and trying for a high score. Killing your host can be a viable strategy, if you gain enough from doing so; but (in the very weak sense that mindless evolving virues can even have 'goals') the 'goal' isn't body count, it's survival and reproduction. Very high mortality is frequently counterproductive, because hosts die faster than the disease can spread to new ones. In broad strokes, high mortality tends to occur when a novel pathogen shows up for the first time; but ends up being selected against over time(see the classic attempt to use Myxoma virus against feral rabbits in Australia).
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.
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So this vaccine could lead to the zombie apocalypse, but with people shuffling around calling out for Nyquil instead of brains?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
And yes, I meant smallpox.
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Yeah: Polio, Smallpox, Scarlet Fever, Malaria, Plague, Anthrax; all of those have historically been defeated by "exercise and vitamins and good food". That's why hardly anyone dies from them anymore. No, wait, sorry, my bad. It's because of vaccines, antibiotics, and sanitation. I always get those mixed up too.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
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."
Research been showing more problems than prevention from vaccines
I'm going to use my annecdotal dataset of one. Let's see, people I know who've had vaccines. Hmm... all of them. Number of those people who have had negative side-effects.... none whatsoever. So, if there are more problems than prevention from vaccines, I'm not seeing it in my little slice of the world.
In fact, given that vaccination rates run at something from 70-90% in industrialised countries and we aren't seeing 70-90% of people suffering more than they might expect from polio, measles, influenza, etc. I'd say that claiming that vaccines do more harm than good is complete bullshit.
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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."
Correlation does not imply causation. Your co-worker's paralysis could could have been caused by a number of factors and probably was not thoroughly explored. The curezone article that was shown is a mis-mash of peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed "articles" from main-stream, generally chemophobic press and even some of the books.
Even the recent thermisol flap was debunked by three research agencies in the US: CDC, FDA with the results being reviewed by three independent agencies (NAS-Institute of Medicine, Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Still after this tremendous amount of research, we still have TV stars warning us about the evil of vaccines and those containing thermisol in particular. As people hear the tripe without investigating, the begin to believe then they stop immunizing their children, and as such we have seen a resurgance of childhood diseases such as whooping cough.
Generally speaking, flu vaccines won't "prevent' the flu as much as it helps reduce duration and severity of the sympotons, as the virus mutates pretty rapidly. One has to look at the risk/benefit of vaccination, not only for themselves but for society as a whole.
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.
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Exercise, vitamins and good food are essential for day-to-day health. If you have enough of those in your life, your chance of keeling over due to a heart attack will drop. However, this doesn't protect you against a viral attack. That's something that this stuff won't do a single thing against. Maybe your healthy body will weather the viral infection slightly better than someone who only sits on the couch eating junk food, but not by much. In fact, someone who sits on the couch eating junk food, but who got the flu vaccine, will tend to be better off when faced with the flu than a healthy eater/exerciser who doesn't get the vaccine.
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No. At least not as far as recent history has proved. We've eliminated lots of disease, from mundane old cholera to smallpox. Even with the advent of global travel, we really haven't seen any new bugs come in to take their place.
However, as others have pointed out, such an "immune flu" might be forced to be much milder by giving up structures which are so necessary that they exist in all flu strains. It's possible that, fifty years down the line, kids (immunized with the universal flu vaccine) might think of "getting the flu" the same way we think of "getting a 24 hour bug" today. You don't feel well for a day and then feel much better (as opposed to today's sick in bed and can't move for a week).
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Make sure you actually do the "keep away from people" bit. Then hopefully it'll just be you and your family dieing from preventable diseases and not the rest of us.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
I must be missing something where malaria has been defeated. Perhaps you might like to inform the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation they are wasting their money.
However in general you are right.
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.
Everything Dr. Hadwen said has been thouroughly debunked, many times over. If you've deluded yourself enough to think otherwise I know you won't read these, but I'll leave the links here just in case:
https://draust.wordpress.com/2008/06/04/who-needs-facts-these-vaccine-conspiracy-pieces-write-themselves%E2%80%A6/
http://skepticalsurfer.blogspot.com/2007/09/terminology-aggressive-vs-conservative.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Vaccine_controversies/Archive_2
http://reasonablehank.com/2012/02/06/judy-judy-judy-are-you-attempting-to-censor-others-right-to-free-speech/
Is 1563649 a prime number?
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.
no matter how many people you run over with a bus, humans are not going to evolve immunity to buses
The ones who don't get run over by buses are more likely to be the ones who pay attention to what's around them or the ones who never leave the house. Both of those are good not-getting-run-over-by-a-bus survival strategies, and they can be passed down to the survivors' offspring.
That _is_ how evolution works.
.... 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!!!!!
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That makes no sense. A vaccination only makes someone's immune system work harder, earlier. It is just like "playing in the dirt", only with particularly useful dirt.
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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!
It's treatable now. People rarely die of it if they can get treatment. It was mostly fatal 100 years ago. It doesn't fit as well as some of the others, but Malaria is much less scary than it once was, even if it isn't "defeated".
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Hi. You clearly have no idea how vaccines work beyond what you've read in Watchtower, and I hope your daughter is taken into the care of people who aren't microcephalic zealots.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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!
How can a vaccine hurt you?
By giving you the symptoms of the disease, or containing something you're allergic to.
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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.
You are correct about the Poster you responded to. However, there is a reason the last flu pandemic with major world health implications was in 1918. That is because that was the last flu pandemic before modern medicine (which I date from the development of sulfa drugs, although some might move it to the mass production of penicillin). Many of those who died from the 1918 flu pandemic actually died from opportunistic infections that attacked them while they were in a weakened state from the flu infection, not from the flu itself. Today most of those opportunistic infections are treatable. It is improbable that we will have a repeat of the 1918 flu pandemic unless we have a collapse of industrial society.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I'm sure the same techniques will function in biological viruses - both from the virus attack point of view and the medical defenders.
You'd be wrong.
And while I'm not an Influenza researcher now, I was one for five years, and there's a pretty good chance I helped supply a good deal of the data being used to work on this.
The human immune system doesn't do bitwise comparisons with the viral genome. It does more of a heuristic match against the functional shape of the created proteins. The problem is that very minor changes in the viral genome can produce functionally significant changes in the shape of the proteins. One of the easier-to-spot mutations was in the length of the Hemaglutinin "stalk". A simple change in the number of repeats in the genome (a simple and fairly stable mutation) will change this length and render antibodies against one version ineffective against another.
Remember, a vaccine is not some sort of program that tries to identify a virus. It is a primer that is designed to trigger the body's immune system to produce effective antibodies. You don't get to redesign how antibodies work. The idea behind vaccine design is to find the right protein fragments to present to the immune system such that it produces antibodies that are effective against the greatest variety of viruses. The part that you think is clever and revolutionary is already being done in your body right now. Everyone in immunology already knows this. Instead, imagine you had a computer that already had a self-learning, heuristic-based virus detection system. What code would you show it to teach it what is a (computer) virus and what isnt? Now, imagine that you didn't have the ability to see what the code actually did, but you could only work with how the code looked. The problem gets harder and your suggestion... doesn't really apply.
Not to sound like a dismissive jerk, but your idea is both old news and largely non-applicable to viral immuno-response.