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Stabilizing prospects for a universal flu vaccine

Nature Biotechnology volume 33, pages 1043–1044 (2015)Cite this article

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An Erratum to this article was published on 11 October 2016

This article has been updated

Months before the flu season strikes each year, the World Health Organization (WHO; Geneva), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC; Atlanta) and other health organizations make a decision about which hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) viral surface antigens to include in the vaccine design. The empirical nature of this process—essentially an educated guess based on epidemiological data from previous flu outbreaks and knowledge of the strains that are currently circulating—means that the effectiveness of conventional flu vaccines varies tremendously from year to year, depending on how well that vaccine matches the strain and lineage of influenza viruses that emerge. What's more, the conventional flu vaccine is unlikely to offer protection against rapidly emerging pandemic virus strains that have no recent precedent, especially if these strains derive from serotypes other than the commonly circulating H1N1 and H3N2 subtypes included in the vaccine. For this reason, a flu vaccine that offers universal protection against all flu strains has remained the Holy Grail for the field. Two recent papers in Science1 and Nature Medicine2 now present major steps toward the development of a flu vaccine that could offer protection against a much broader range of influenza strains across a variety of serotypes.

Although flu vaccines comprise both HA and NA epitopes, antibodies against HA are thought to be particularly important in efficiently neutralizing the virus by blocking host cell attachment and entry. HA consists of two major domains: first, a globular head domain, which is highly divergent between different virus subtypes and strains, and, second, the stalk domain, which is much more conserved—and thus represents a more attractive target for a universal vaccine—but which rarely elicits a strong immune response in humans.

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Change history

  • 28 July 2016

    In the version of this article initially published, the name and title of the author, Markus Elsner, Senior Editor, was omitted. The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

References

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Stabilizing prospects for a universal flu vaccine. Nat Biotechnol 33, 1043–1044 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3378

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