Biotech Values

[Biowatch]

First Universal Flu Vaccine to Enter Ph3 Trial

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/first-universal-flu-vaccine-to-enter-phase-3-trial-65073?utm_campaign

Numerous experimental vaccines that aim to provide multi-season protection are in human studies.

Nov 12, 2018
ASHLEY P. TAYLOR

...In February 2018—in the midst of the worst flu season in a decade—the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) announced that it would prioritize the development of a universal flu vaccine. It also published a strategic plan for achieving that goal, which includes learning more about the influenza virus and its pathogenesis, characterizing the human immune response to the flu, and supporting the development of universal influenza vaccines. To that end, NIAID is funding many universal vaccine trials...

The Phase 3 study

Influenza has two surface glycoproteins: hemagglutinin, which helps the virus enter host cells, and neuramidase, which helps the virus spread among cells. Hemagglutinin is commonly likened to a mushroom because it has a round head and a stalk. The highly variable head is what seasonal flu vaccines tend to generate antibodies against. The stalk, in contrast, is more conserved, and so is the target of many efforts to generate a universal flu vaccine.

BiondVax’s M-001 vaccine—the furthest along in the pipeline toward a universal flu vaccine—contains no viruses, dead or alive; rather, it is a peptide vaccine. It contains nine, highly conserved viral epitopes, those parts of an antigen recognized by the immune system, that are common to 40,000 influenza viruses listed in a National Institutes of Health database, Ben-Yedidia tells The Scientist. These epitopes come from three different viral proteins: M1 (a matrix protein that lines the viral envelope), NP (a nucleoprotein that wraps around the viral RNA), and conserved parts of the hemagglutinin head...

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