You could call them signs of the season.
As summer turns to fall, leaves change color in many parts of the country. Farmers prepare to harvest crops. College and pro football take center stage. And health care providers remind us that it’s time to get our flu shots.
One of those may be changing.
“During the course of a flu season, the influenza virus drifts, undergoing small, but significant changes that make current vaccines less effective,” said Dr. Emmanuel Walter, chief medical officer and director of the Duke Vaccine and Trials Unit, in a news release. “That’s why new flu vaccines are created every year, and why doctors recommend a yearly flu shot. We are hopeful this vaccine could offer protection across those sorts of changes.”
You guessed it. That reminder of a yearly flu shot may not be needed in the future.
That’s because Duke University is testing a universal flu vaccine that would protect against both seasonal and pandemic forms of the flu.
Current flu vaccines are formulated in advance of the flu season, based on predictions by scientists of which strain will be the most dominant.
That gives manufacturers enough time to produce vaccines.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control says that while flu vaccines are roughly 40–60% effective each season, the shots still provide the best protection against the illness.
“One of the big problems with flu vaccines is that flu changes, and by the time we pick the strains that go into the vaccines and then manufacture the vaccines, the virus can change or mutate,” said Dr. Walter. “It can even change once we are into the flu season.”
The goal of the Duke vaccine trial is to create a more advanced vaccine that provides longer and broader protection against the flu. The trial is led by the Duke Human Vaccine Institute and is part of the Collaborative Influenza Vaccine Innovation Centers (CIVICs), which is supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Traditional vaccines put a weakened or inactive virus into our bodies, letting our immune system develop antibodies to fight infections.
The flu vaccine being tested in the phase-1 trial is a formula developed with mRNA technology, the same technology used to develop the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines.
Messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines teach cells how to make a protein that triggers an immune response in a person who gets infected by a virus.
“You just have to plug that in and you’re ready to go, which makes it very adaptable and easier to produce,” adds Dr. Walter.
To learn how the Duke Human Vaccine Institute created its COVID-19 vaccine using mRNA technology, watch this Sci NC story.
Fifty participants between the ages of 18 and 49 will receive different dosage levels of the trial vaccine. There’s also a portion of the group that will be used as a control group and receive the current vaccine. All participants will be monitored for a full year. Based on the results, the trial could be expanded to include other age groups.
“The main objective of the trial is to evaluate the safety of each dose,” said Dr. Walter. “The second goal is to assess the immune response at each level. The third goal is to gauge how long the immune response lasts and whether it’s effective over time once the virus has undergone those small drift changes.”
In the meantime, while research into a universal flu vaccine continues, Dr. Walker reminds everyone to get a flu shot.
