Neutralizing the flu

Although vaccination against one influenza strain doesn't typically provide protection against distantly related ones, NIH researchers have employed a new detection method to show that most people do in fact make low levels of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs). The lessons learned could provide a much-needed break for researchers working on a universal flu vaccine, and raise the question of whether a paradigm shift from active to passive prophylaxis might be a better solution.

For the last 30 years, efforts to design a universal flu vaccine have centered on the highly conserved stem region of the viral HA protein. However, a major obstacle has been the lack of detailed information about which epitopes within the HA stem region are key to driving broad immunity due to the difficulty of detecting and isolating bNAbs from patients...