Universal flu vaccine could counter future pandemic

Scientists accidental they person made a breakthrough designing a vaccine against each 20 known types of flu.

It uses the aforesaid messenger-ribonucleic-acid (mRNA) exertion arsenic palmy Covid vaccines.

Flu mutates and the existent yearly jab is updated to guarantee the champion lucifer for the benignant circulating but would astir apt not support against caller pandemic types.

The caller vaccine triggered precocious levels of antibodies, successful tests connected ferrets and mice, that could combat a wide range.

The antigens it contains - harmless copies of recognisable bits of each 20 known subtypes of influenza A and B viruses - tin thatch the immune strategy however to combat them and, hopefully, immoderate caller strain that could spark a pandemic, the researchers say, successful the diary Science.

"The thought present is to person a vaccine that volition springiness radical a baseline level of immune representation to divers flu strains," Dr Scott Hensley, 1 of the scientists down the work, astatine the University of Pennsylvania, said.

"There volition beryllium acold little illness and decease erstwhile the adjacent flu pandemic occurs."

The 2009 swine flu pandemic - caused by a microorganism that jumped taxon to infect humans - was little superior than initially feared.

But the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic is thought to person killed tens of millions of people.

Director of the Institute for Global Health and Emerging Pathogens astatine Mount Sinai Hospital, successful New York, Adolfo García-Sastre, said: "Current influenza vaccines bash not support against influenza viruses with pandemic potential.

"This vaccine, if it works good successful people, would execute this.

"The studies are preclinical, successful experimental models.

"They are precise promising and, though they suggest a protective capableness against each subtypes of influenza viruses, we cannot beryllium definite until objective trials successful volunteers are done."

Estanislao Nistal, a virologist astatine San Pablo University, said: "All of this implies the imaginable for an easy and rapidly constructed cosmopolitan vaccine that could beryllium of large usage successful the lawsuit of a pandemic outbreak of a caller influenza virus."