New vaccine saves against all types of flu

At Imperial College London, scientists, together with researchers from the National Institutes of Health, are very close to creating a universal vaccine that will make the human body able to resist almost any viral infection.

The research began in 2009, during the epidemic of the A H1N1 virus (swine flu), which, as a result of gene recombination, began to infect people. Many people had an extremely severe form of the disease; the human body was simply not ready for the new type of virus. Many scientists became interested in the question of why in some cases the disease was relatively mild, with minimal complications, while in others the consequences were extremely severe, often fatal. As specialists found out, the cause of this was antigen-tested CD8+ T cells.

With an increased concentration of these cells, the body is able to resist almost any viral disease. Since the flu virus mutates every year, each time posing an increasing danger to the health and life of people, especially children and the elderly, vaccines developed for a specific strain of the virus quickly become unsuitable. In this regard, experts work every year to develop new vaccines that are suitable for a specific strain of the virus. Vaccine development takes a lot of time and money, and it also takes time to improve and approve the vaccine. The vaccine appears on the market at the very height of the epidemic, when the flu has already affected hundreds of people, and fatal cases are not uncommon.

Therefore, scientists have thought about inventing a universal vaccine that would allow the body to cope more easily with viruses that mutate every year. To create such a vaccine, as it turned out, it is necessary to find a way to increase the concentration of CD8+ T cells, in which case the issue of viral infections, which is so acute every year, would be resolved. CD8+ T cells are produced by the body specifically to protect against infection, the more of these cells in the body, the easier a person tolerates the disease and the lower the risk of complications. The cells are aimed at destroying the viral core, which is the same for all types of influenza viruses, so you only need to push the body to produce these cells. Scientists note that the new vaccine will allow us to fight not only viruses that humans are susceptible to, but also those that have mutated from animal species (as in the case of swine flu). Of course, the miracle vaccine will not be able to completely eliminate the possibility of infection, but its use would help to tolerate the disease much easier, as well as avoid severe consequences and complications.

It will take specialists at least 5 years to improve a universal vaccine. But the wait for a miracle vaccine is worth it, because every year more than 5 million people suffer from the flu virus and complications associated with the disease, and about 500 thousand people die from the flu, including children.