Influenza, the virus that causes the flu, can be deadly. Twenty different types of the virus have been identified. Many of these circulate between animals and people. This, along with the seasonal virus’s frequent mutations, makes developing effective flu vaccines with broad protection difficult.
Seasonal flu vaccines are reformulated each year to tailor them to the virus types predicted to be most common in the upcoming flu season. If these predictions are off, the season’s flu vaccine may not provide optimal protection.
Researchers have long been working toward a universal vaccine that could protect against all known influenza types and prevent future flu pandemics. Most of these efforts have focused on trying to induce the immune system to recognize areas of the virus that are similar between types.
An NIH-funded research team led by Dr. Scott Hensley from the University of Pennsylvania tested a different strategy. They designed a vaccine that included a virus protein from all 20 distinct influenza types. Such a strategy hadn’t been possible with traditional vaccine production methods. But the researchers thought it might be with mRNA technology. This technology had been used for some of the vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19…
