NIH unveils a vaccine candidate for universal flu jab as first-in-human studies get underway
A little more than a year after mapping a path to developing a universal flu vaccine — one of the Holy Grails in medicine — the NIH has a candidate in hand that it’s starting to test in healthy human volunteers.
H1ssF_3928 differs from seasonal influenza vaccines in that it displays a different part of hemagglutinin (HA), one of two proteins that classify flu viruses (the other is neuraminidase, or NA). HA consists of a head and a stem region, and while the head typically receives most of the immune response, it also changes constantly. The new vaccine ditches the head entirely in favor of the stem, which is more constant among different influenza strains.
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