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SALT LAKE CITY — If you don't want to spend a week miserably wrapped in a blanket during the winter, you grin and bear that awful needle and get your yearly flu shot each and every year.
Even with that protection, every few years there's another scare about a super bug like bird flu or swine flu that threatens to go get out of hand, and which we often don't have enough vaccines for anyway.
But what if you never had to worry about any of that again and one vaccine could protect against all forms of the flu forever? It's not so far off. German medical scientists are a few years away, but their vaccine is not traditional: It uses a form of the genetic material that makes viruses tick, called mRNA.
How the flu works
Why do we have to get a new flu vaccine every year? Why isn't it a one-time thing like other vaccines? The short answer is that evolution beguiles us when it comes to the flu.
Traditional vaccines work by getting the body to recognize proteins on the virus called HA and NA, hence names like H1N1 or H5N1.
HA is used by the virus to get into our cells, and NA is used to get out once the virus has replicated. If the body recognizes these proteins, it can fight against the flu. But those proteins subtly change all the time due to rapid evolution at the viral level. So every year or so there's a flu strain that can still hurt you, but is just different enough from last year that your body doesn't recognize it and can't fight it off.
Related:
Flu during pregnancy linked to autism in children
In the last ten years, rates of children born with autism have started to increase, creeping from roughly 1 in 150 kids in 2000, to 1 in 88 in 2008. In Utah, that number is much higher — roughly 1 in 47. Scientists and doctors aren't entirely sure why these numbers continue to rise.Vaccines tell your body what to expect before you actually get sick. But traditional vaccines are usually grown in chicken eggs and then purified, a process that can take months. That forces us to not only make a new vaccine every year, but also guess which strain of the virus to protect against.
How an mRNA vaccine works
Rather than just tell the body to recognize HA or NA and target the virus, this mRNA vaccine tells your body to recognize the RNA that creates the HA and NA proteins in the first place. So no matter which strain of flu you have — last year's, this year's, H1N1, etc. — your body's immune system knows how to deal with it and take it out.
The vaccine would not only make your immune system produce antibodies, but immune cells like T-cells would also recognize the mRNA. That means two immune responses kick in as opposed to one.
The German company that is working on the virus, called CureVac, has found a way to stabilize the vaccine by binding it with protamine. That prevents your body from simply metabolizing it all away.
Trials in animals have shown very promising results. Not only that, but the vaccine is so stable that you can actually powder it and freeze dry it, making the vaccine long-lasting and easily transportable. It can also be manufactured easily and cheaply in weeks rather than months. Current vaccines must be refrigerated and are much more expensive and time-consuming to produce.
