Scientists at Oxford University have successfully tested a universal flu vaccine that could work against all known strains of the illness, taking a significant step in the fight against a disease that affects billions of people each year.
The treatment – using a new technique and tested for the first time on humans infected with flu – targets a different part of the flu virus to traditional vaccines, meaning it does not need expensive reformulation every year to match the most prevalent virus that is circulating the world.
Developed by a team led by Dr Sarah Gilbert at Oxford's Jenner Institute, the vaccine targets proteins inside the flu virus that are common across all strains, instead of those that sit on the virus's external coat, which are liable to mutate.
If used widely a universal flu vaccine could prevent pandemics, such as the swine flu outbreaks of recent years, and end the need for a seasonal flu jab.
"The problem with flu is that you've got lots of different strains and they keep changing," said Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute. "Occasionally one comes out of wildfowl or pigs and we're not immune to it. We need new vaccines and we can't make them fast enough."
A universal vaccine would save the time and money now needed to create vaccines to fight whatever particular virus has emerged in any year. The government spent an estimated £1.2bn in preparing for the swine flu outbreak of last winter.
The process of developing a seasonal vaccine takes at least four months and if the flu strain is highly pathogenic – as in 1918 when millions of people died – the delay means more people get sick and die before the vaccine is ready.
This winter the government was criticised for its handling of the annual winter flu outbreak. Shortages of the seasonal flu vaccine became so acute in some areas that GPs were told to use old stocks of swine flu vaccine instead.
"If we were using the same vaccine year in, year out, it would be more like vaccinating against other diseases like tetanus," said Gilbert. "It would become a routine vaccination that would be manufactured and used all the time at a steady level. We wouldn't have these sudden demands or shortages – all that would stop."
While traditional vaccines prompt the body to create antibodies, Gilbert's vaccine boosts the number of the body's T-cells, another key part of the immune system. These can identify and destroy body cells that have been infected by a virus.
In her trial, Gilbert vaccinated 11 healthy volunteers and then infected them, along with 11 non-vaccinated volunteers, with the Wisconsin strain of the H3N2 influenza A virus, which was first isolated in 2005. She monitored the volunteers' symptoms twice a day, including runny noses, coughs and sore throats, and she calculated how much mucus everyone produced by weighing tissues they used. Though a small study, it was significant in that it was the first vaccine of its type to be tested on people.
Gilbert said: "This is the first time anyone's tested if you can boost somebody's T-cell response to flu and, having done that, if it helps protect against getting flu. It's the first time anybody's done that in people."
Her results showed that the vaccine worked as planned. "Fewer of the people who were vaccinated got flu than the people who weren't vaccinated," said Gilbert. "We did get an indication that the vaccine was protecting people, not only from the numbers of people who got flu but also from looking at their T-cells before we gave them flu. The people we vaccinated had T-cells that were more activated. The people we hadn't vaccinated had T-cells as well but they were in a resting state so they would probably have taken longer to do anything. The volunteers we vaccinated had T-cells that were activated, primed and ready to kill. There were more T-cells in people we vaccinated and they were more activated." Gilbert has now sent her results to a scientific journal.
Hill said the trial proved two important things about the vaccine. "It showed that it was safe; and giving people flu virus in the presence of lots of T-cells induced by the vaccine was absolutely fine.
"What we'll probably do is take the existing flu vaccine and mix in the new virus-vector vaccine, so you get both good antibodies and good T-cells. As well as giving you the antibodies for this season's strain of flu, we'll give you some T-cells that will cover this season, next year, next year and thereafter. It may not be 100% effective against all strains, but at least if there were a pandemic coming around, it would cover you for any strain."
It is believed that the vaccine could provide better protection against flu for older people. The Jenner Institute scientists are already testing it on people over 50, a group that does not respond so well to traditional vaccines.
"The [traditional flu] vaccine efficacy is 70-80% of young people, but only 30-40% in old people," said Hill. "What we'll do is an efficacy trial in the elderly and try to improve that 30-40% to hopefully double that."
Gilbert says that the older people get, the less efficient their immune systems are at making new antibodies. "Immune memory lasts longer than that, so if people have already got responses to something, it's not so difficult to re-activate them. What we're trying to do with our T-cell vaccine is re-activate the T-cell responses they've already got as a result of their previous exposure to flu."
The next step for the T-cell vaccine is to stage a field trial in comparing several thousand people are given and not given the vaccine. It will take several more years, therefore, before Gilbert's vaccine can be licensed for use alongside traditional, antibody-inducing vaccines.
Mark Fielder, a medical microbiologist at Kingston University, said: "This study represents some potentially very exciting findings with positive implications not only for influenza but possibly for infectious disease in a wider context. The findings are extremely encouraging in terms of the apparent efficacy of the virus and the that it appears to be a safe formulation. However, I think that a larger trial will be able to confirm these findings and let this technology be taken forward."
He added: "T-cell vaccines are an exciting technology and we should encourage research and development into the area of vaccinology to help combat infectious diseases in all parts of the world."
Target proteins
A traditional flu vaccine uses the external proteins on a flu virus (the H and N on strains such as H1N1 and H3N2) to prompt the body's immune system to create antibodies. These proteins, however, are different across different strains and they are liable to mutate, making immune responses from vaccines limited.
Instead, Sarah Gilbert's team at the Jenner Institute created a vaccine that targets two proteins inside the flu virus that are much more similar across strains and less liable to change over time. Nucleoprotein and matrix protein 1 are more than 90% identical in all strains of influenza A. "The nucleoprotein is wrapped around the viral RNA, there's quite a lot of it in flu virus and infected cells," she said.
"It's essential for the virus because, if it doesn't have the nucleoprotein, its genome isn't stable. It can't do without it and it can't change it very much because it has a particular function and, if it mutates, it won't work. Matrix protein 1 is a structural protein which is part of the inside of the shell around the virus." Though Gilbert used the H3N2/Wisconsin strain in her trial, she can therefore be confident that her results will also hold for other strains.
Comments
6 February 2011 10:49PM
Yay, SCIENCE!
6 February 2011 10:52PM
This is EPIC!!
Will it be available at a supermarket near me soon?
6 February 2011 10:54PM
"Yay, Science" indeed, MarshallStack
Though I hope to God a cure for Man Flu is NEVER found.
Whilst Man Flu is highly debilitating - often more painful then giving birth I understand (man flu gave me a right headache last week) - using it to get off work is great. And telling the wife I can't go shopping or visit the in-laws.
6 February 2011 10:55PM
The important question here is: when it all goes wrong, will they be fast zombies or slow zombies?
6 February 2011 10:57PM
@FundusVentriculi
"This is EPIC!! Will it be available at a supermarket near me soon?"
And you, sir, are a little girl! Man up! Man flu must be kept out of this fantastic cure. I can't stand shopping. Or going to work on a Friday when I want a long weekend.
6 February 2011 10:57PM
And the Tories are cutting science funding... idiots.
6 February 2011 10:58PM
Just for some background, Sarah Gilbert of Oxford University has a paper due to be published in next month's issue of the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, which describes her earlier work on the vaccine and her methods in more detail. It's everything that led up to the flu-challenge trial I've described above (which is yet to be published):
http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/52/1/1.full
And there's an interesting commentary published alongside it by Sophie Hambleton of the University of Newcastle in the same issue of the journal:
http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/52/1/8.full
6 February 2011 10:58PM
Either way, at least they won't have runny noses or a cough.
6 February 2011 11:01PM
Science. It works, bitches!
6 February 2011 11:04PM
@StThomas
Science. It works, bitches!
Yes! Guillain-Barre syndromes all round!!
6 February 2011 11:05PM
Great news and a good, thorough article. Nice to see some detail and explanation rather than the identikit press releases so ubiquitous elsewhere. Thanks!
6 February 2011 11:07PM
Hmmm. Perhaps should have waited for the paper to be accepted first before publicising?
6 February 2011 11:12PM
@SeanThorp, any chance of an explanation of your comment, for the uninformed?
6 February 2011 11:13PM
peeceedee, I actually heard about this on Skeptics Guide to the Universe about 6 months ago.
6 February 2011 11:13PM
A little bit strange to be posting an article that is still unpublished and yet to undergo peer review both from the stance of the guardian and the studies authors...
usually having publicity drawn to the data and mentioning the data in certain contexts could jeopardise your chance of publication, and furthermore none of it has been ratified by others in the field to confirm their interpretations and validity
6 February 2011 11:15PM
Those that make millions upon millions every year on the ever changing flu virus will now scream and spend a fortune to discredit this...and / or then spend a fortune to remove this discovery off the market - just watch...
6 February 2011 11:16PM
6 February 2011 11:17PM
I don't think that counts as peer review, somehow.
6 February 2011 11:19PM
Uh oh, this may be how the zombie apocolypse gets started.
6 February 2011 11:30PM
Will this be Britain's last scientific breakthrough?
6 February 2011 11:32PM
@statica
V. funny.
But seriously, if it is a success, well done to those involved and indeed hurrah for science.
6 February 2011 11:40PM
A promising looking new approach, but so far only tested on a small number of people. I feel (hope) it will be some years before this comes into widespread use.
6 February 2011 11:43PM
@SeanThorp risk of GBS after vaccine 1/100,000 to 1/1000000. Risk of dying after the flu, definitely higher
6 February 2011 11:45PM
While I congratulate Dr. Gilbert on her success, there are clearly enormous issues with this test. Nucleoproteins that are wrapped and not exposed to the surface, though far less mutable, clearly will be useless in terms of antibody production that can attack intact virus and in terms of production of effective memory cells. Thus, what we have is an injection of foreign protein that activates T-cells (as any foreign protein would). How long does T-cell activation last? Would one need , for example, to be vaccinated every 72 hours? Would any foreign protein (viral nuclear protein or ham sandwhich) elicit the same effect? It is not surprising that priming the immune system will help in fighting subsequent infection. The question is how much virus was introduced into the test subjects: enough to produce a clinically/pathologically significant viral load. Diminution of basic symptoms associated with any inflammatory response for test subjects with pre-primed immune response is or should be expected. The quantitative assessment with viral titers and adequate controls is sorely needed to make this story a story.
6 February 2011 11:46PM
I think this is a jolly good idea because colds are the bane of my life and so is a sore toe this minute I stubbed it as I was running upstairs from the studio
6 February 2011 11:52PM
Guillain-Barre syndrome is a that occurred in one in one million recipients of flu vaccines prior to 1976, and may have occurred more recently in a small number of vaccine recipients.
So long as it is treated properly, most patients recover fully.
Hurray, indeed, for Science.
7 February 2011 12:10AM
I think this could be an absolutely amazing discovery! Scientists have been saying that cancer is caused by first a rogue gene, then a virus to trigger it, so if we had a vaccine like this - who knows? Maybe it would stop the one in three that Cancer Research UK are saying are going to get cancer in the future?
We can always live in hope?
I know that lifestyle also contributes to cancers, but this could be a start of something huge!
7 February 2011 12:16AM
"The problem with flu is that you've got lots of different strains and they keep changing," said Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute."
"you've got?"
ILLITERACY.
No, I dont. I dont have ANY different strains.
Since when did the word "you" become an article?
Since when has "you" become an accusation?
"THERE ARE many different strains..."
Its ENGLISH, people, let's get it right!
7 February 2011 12:18AM
My father was in the Italian merchant marine. He jumped ship in New York harbor in July of 1919. He remembered seeing people walking in the snow that Winter and dropping in their tracks onto the New York sidewalks. Debilitated by influenza, they were too weak to walk. The pandemic was in 1918, but it continued into the next year at a minimum. The spooky part of my father's recounting was that none of his stories of this event told of anyone helping the fallen. Ill people were treated worse than AIDs patients in the 1980s--and for good reason. Influenza really could be contracted by proximity. One does not need physical contact to catch influenza. Start polishing off the Nobel prizes in medicine if this vaccine proves effective.
7 February 2011 12:19AM
Gelion 10:54PM
Have no fears, Gelion. The strain of Orthomyxoviridae that affects only human males has yet to be identified, and so no vaccine will be developed for some considerable time.
We are safe for a while.
7 February 2011 12:28AM
With medical advantages like these comes a problem - world population.
The planet is struggling to feed the people we have now and resources like clean water and energy becoming scarcer..
I do not have any answers but we will have to face this problem soon.
7 February 2011 12:30AM
6 days later?
7 February 2011 12:41AM
Christ! And I thought I was a pedant. You really do need to get out more.
Oh, and if you're going to toss accusations of illiteracy around, you might want to pay more attention to your punctuation, in particular apostrophes.
7 February 2011 12:52AM
And what else you figure the governments are going to put into this man flu virus shot?
7 February 2011 12:55AM
@BadDog
Everyone knows man flu is regular flu but because of our high levels of testosterone suppressing our immune response it affects men worse!
This is my story and I'm sticking to it!
7 February 2011 12:57AM
BadDog
With medical advantages like these comes a problem - world population.
The planet is struggling to feed the people we have now and resources like clean water and energy becoming scarcer..
I do not have any answers but we will have to face this problem soon.
It should be clear that "not everyone" will be getting this breakthrough vaccine, as most don't get the other breakthrough vaccines around the world. The population of industrialized countries will level off on their own, except for maybe China, because, families are finding it difficult to support large herds of people. Again except for immigrants who live off the efforts of their host country. All in all, don't sweat it. You will be long gone before it becomes a problem....
7 February 2011 1:00AM
Hmmm...but doesn't the world really need a new amazing but dangerous psychotropic drug right now?
We need to control human population and get high...as high as we can get high!
PCP sounds good but where can you get hold of that?
No, we need a new drug with an amazing high and a high death rate.
Then we'll be O.K.
7 February 2011 1:04AM
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7 February 2011 1:05AM
@MrShigemitsu
@SeanThorp, any chance of an explanation of your comment, for the uninformed?
Yes it was made in half-jest and not entirely serious. Occurrences of Guillain-Barre and other autoimmune disorders, which are on the increase, have been linked to vaccination programs. However such links are very hard to prove. Personally I'll risk the jabs against such things as yellow fever but I'd be reluctant to risk a flu jab.
7 February 2011 1:14AM
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7 February 2011 1:25AM
Chuckle at meepmeep. We can only hope they are slow enough not to catch Charlie Brooker before he can pen another miniseries though, sorry Charlie, but they may have to be very very slow.
7 February 2011 1:26AM
"Hooray for science," cries Tiny Tim. Is this the kind of science that gave us genetically modified animals, plants, & fish? You know, the strains that are now taking over, eradicating the silly old strains of the world that are the products of millions of years of evolution. That evolution was a kind of long-term testing. Has anyone done lengthy tests on this latest whizz-bang drug? Over to the Strangelove Institute, associate of Globdrug, Inc. OGT
7 February 2011 1:29AM
Excellent point.
You get to receive the flu vaccine developed by English Lit grads.
7 February 2011 1:56AM
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7 February 2011 1:58AM
How long until they force it upon everyone by putting it in tap water?
7 February 2011 2:06AM
I will believe it when I see it on offer at my GP's surgery.
We have had these ''Flu cure here at last'' before.
This may turn out to be mirage too.
Good luck to the researchers, especially given these Tory Cu*ts!
How is finding a cure or E=MC^2, Big Bang Theory, Evolution Theory disprove the existence of God?
I take it when the first person who lit his own fire thought, there is no God! When he got burnt and was dying and couldn't be helped he began to believe in God but it was too late!
Fools Gold.
7 February 2011 2:10AM
@ seanthorp
In fact, the YF vaccine is highly neurotropic and has a high risk of complications such as GBS and encephalomyelitis. The flu vaccine is much much safer and these complications are very scarcely reported.
Having said all that, Dr Gilbert needs to publish data from more than just 11 cases before she can call the vaccine 'safe'.
7 February 2011 2:27AM
Interesting but based on vaccination history I'll go out on a limb and state for the record (or internet archives):
1> Flu will still be around 50 years fro now.
2> the statistics will be hotly debated but pretty much flu will affect the same kind of numbers of people then as now
A cochrane report pretty much demolished the efficacy of flu jab programmes several years ago although the response from governments and industry was pretty much "Meh - whatever. Go and get your flu jab it'll do you good."
7 February 2011 2:28AM
Guardian - seriously? Front page article and the data hasn't even undergone peer review.
I am all for good science and the reporting of early human studies. But even the very limited information provided here states some of those who were vaccinated got the flu. So does this unbelievably premature guardian article deserve to be published at this stage? Poor stuff guardian.
7 February 2011 2:31AM
All this excitement - and then N.I.C.E won't pay for it.
(Unless they get cut first).