A new flu vaccine that protects against multiple strains of the flu, including H1N1, has been developed by researchers at University of Georgia and Sanofi Pasteur. This new flu vaccine proved to be effective against seasonal type flu strains and pandemic flu strains in mice. Flu season is one of the largest times of illness here in America with millions visiting doctors on a daily basis. Some people even get sick even after receiving a flu vaccine to prevent them from getting sick. The flu virus adapts and changes and perhaps this new flu vaccine will be an effective weapon.
“One of the problems with current influenza vaccines is that we have to make predictions about which virus strains will be most prevalent every year and build our vaccines around those predictions,” said Ted Ross, director of UGA’s Center for Vaccines and Immunology and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Infectious Diseases in the College of Veterinary Medicine. “What we have developed is a vaccine that protects against multiple different strains of H1N1 virus at once, so we might be able to one day replace the current standard of care with this more broadly cross-protective vaccine.”
“We still have some work to do before we get a truly universal flu vaccine,” Ross said. “But the COBRA vaccine we’ve developed for H1N1 virus subtypes is a major step in the right direction.”
Science and research are powerful tools, while we’re not at a universal flu vaccine spot just yet, perhaps sometime in the near future we will be. One can only hope anyway. The researchers from University of Georgia and Sanofi Pasteur will be presenting their papers today at the World Vaccine Congress in Washington D.C.
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[button link=”https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160329101750.htm” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: Science Daily[/button]Last Updated on January 23, 2017.
