A step toward a universal flu vaccine

MIT News  October 7, 2020
Most flu vaccines consist of inactivated flu viruses coated with a protein called hemagglutinin (HA), which helps them bind to host cells. After vaccination, the immune system generates squadrons of antibodies which almost always bind to the head of the HA protein which mutates rapidly. Parts of the HA stem very rarely mutate. The immune system is intrinsically not good at seeing the conserved parts of these proteins, which if effectively targeted would elicit an antibody response that would neutralize multiple influenza types. A team of researchers in the US (MIT, Harvard University, industry) describe why the immune system ends up targeting the HA head rather than the stem, and to find ways to refocus the immune system’s attention on the stem. The researchers developed a computational model that helped them to further explore the “immunodominance” of the protein’s head region. Using mice with human immune cells, the researchers tested this strategy, first immunizing them against the 2009 H1N1 strain, followed by a nanoparticle vaccine carrying the HA stem protein from a different H1N1 strain. They found that this approach was much more successful at eliciting broadly neutralizing antibodies than any of the other strategies that they tested…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE

Graphical abstract. Credit: Cell Systems, October 07, 2020

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