It’s flu season. In the United States, at state health departments and academic medical units, as well as at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), epidemiologists carefully analyze two sets of data: the number of flu cases and the number of Americans who have been vaccinated.
For now, the balance between the two seems good. In much of the United States, the incidence of flu-like illnesses (those that cause fever and sore throat but are not confirmed by laboratory tests) is low. Only 2% of virus samples collected from patients and sent to laboratories for confirmation turned out to be influenza. So far, More than 142 million Americans have been vaccinatedconsuming most of the 156 to 170 million doses of vaccine that manufacturers expect to distribute this fall.
But there’s one more piece of information that can give analysts an idea of how this flu season will play out: If the vaccine is really effective. For example, last year immunization was 54% effective. Last year, only 36% of users were protected against the disease. Since 2009, its effectiveness has ranged from a high of 60% to a low of 19%.
This change illustrates the biggest challenge in fighting the flu: Tireless, never-ending mutation. Every year, vaccine manufacturers in each hemisphere come up with new formulations based on the vaccines in circulation. But they could never be sure whether the strains they targeted in the lab would look the same six months later in the wild, or whether something entirely new would have spread to most people.
That’s why every summer, as flu season approaches in the Northern Hemisphere, public health officials predict the numbers with concern. Will the manufacturer deliver the vaccine on time? Will enough people accept it? How effective is it? Every year, when they see the numbers coming together, at least some of them yearn for something that could shorten the wait: a vaccine that works no matter how the virus changes, and that can be produced early enough to avoid doses shortage. .
This goal is called universal flu vaccine. For immunologists, it has been a mirage at the end of the rainbow for more than a decade, a long-desired treasure that has remained just out of reach. Recently, however, the search for better options has yielded promising results. A vaccine candidate developed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has entered the second phase of Phase 1 clinical trials, testing whether a compound is safe in humans. Other drug candidates developed by Moderna are based on mRNA technology to rapidly develop COVID-19 vaccines and are currently in Phase 1/2 and Phase 3 trials, in which efficacy is assessed. The novel construct developed by the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and University of Pennsylvania team achieved promising results in mice. All are feats of engineering and imagination, leveraging the latest virological tools against old foes.
Is it possible to develop a universal flu vaccine?
There is still much work to be done.this Influenza is a complex and unstable virus Since the release of the first vaccine against the virus in 1945, the virus has not been contained for long. It remains so complex that some scientists leading the search for better tools have begun renaming what they are looking for. “We no longer call it a ‘universal flu vaccine,'” says vaccine immunologist Masaru Kanekiyo, director of the Molecular Immunity Engineering Division at the National Institutes of Health’s Vaccine Research Center. “We’ve been calling her”Super seasonal vaccine‘, which is essentially an improvement over the current seasonal vaccines. “
To understand why improved vaccines are so important, it is important to consider the public health burden of influenza. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that in the United States alone, up to 41 million people get sick each year and cause 12,000 to 52,000 deaths, depending on the severity of the season. According to the World Health Organization, there are up to 1 billion cases and 650,000 deaths globally each year. That’s the flu vaccine that currently controls the effects of the disease, although public health planners recognize that it exists in greater quantities, especially in rich countries, and in much smaller quantities in emerging economies.