The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently announced that patients are now enrolling in an early-stage clinical trial to test a universal flu vaccine based on messenger RNA technology.
Scientists hope the vaccine will protect against a wide variety of flu strains and provide long-term immunity so people do not have to receive a shot every year.Messenger RNA, or mRNA, is the technology behind Moderna’s and Pfizer’s widely used Covid vaccines. NIH played a crucial role in developing the mRNA platform used by Moderna.“A universal flu vaccine could serve as an important line of defense against the spread of a future flu pandemic,” Dr. Hugh Auchincloss, acting director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a statement Monday.The universal flu vaccine trial will enroll up to 50 healthy people ages 18 through 49 to test whether the experimental shot is safe and produces an immune response, according to NIH.
The groups will assist researchers in determining the best dosage. Once the optimal dosage has been determined, an additional ten participants will be vaccinated with it.
…””One of the big problems for flu is flu changes. By the time we pick the strains that go in the vaccines, by the time flu vaccines get manufactured, sometimes the strain can change some, or even during the season, from September to January or February, the flu strain can change as well,” said [Dr. Emmanuel Walter of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute, who serves as principal investigator leading the clinical trials]….During Phase 1 of the trial, enrollees will be monitored for a year, and will receive different dosage levels, with a portion of participants used as a control group with the current vaccine. Researchers will study the vaccine’s safety and immune response, including how it holds up if the virus changes. Based off those results, it could be expanded to include other age groups.
While the effectiveness of the covid vaccines is questionable, and the results of the mRNA flu vaccine are being evaluated, researchers have used mRNA technology to create a pancreatic cancer treatment that is showing some astonishing results.
The vaccine provoked an immune response in half of the patients treated, and those people showed no relapse of their cancer during the course of the study, a finding that outside experts described as extremely promising.The study, published in Nature, was a landmark in the yearslong movement to make cancer vaccines tailored to the tumors of individual patients.Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, led by Dr. Vinod Balachandran, extracted patients’ tumors and shipped samples of them to Germany. There, scientists at BioNTech, the company that made a highly successful Covid vaccine with Pfizer, analyzed the genetic makeup of certain proteins on the surface of the cancer cells.Using that genetic data, BioNTech scientists then produced personalized vaccines designed to teach each patient’s immune system to attack the tumors. Like BioNTech’s Covid shots, the cancer vaccines relied on messenger RNA. In this case, the vaccines instructed patients’ cells to make some of the same proteins found on their excised tumors, potentially provoking an immune response that would come in handy against actual cancer cells.
Hopefully, the pancreatic cancer treatment is proved to be a success and the flu vaccine will actually be a real vaccine that prevents infection and transmission.
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