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Who discovered the influenza vaccine?

Virology: How can vaccines against influenza and other virus diseases be made more effective?

  • How Can Vaccines Against Influenza and Other Viral Diseases Be Made More Effective? 2010 PLoS Biol 8(12): e1000571. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000571  How Can Vaccines Against Influenza and Other Viral Diseases Be Made More Effective? 2010 PLoS Biol 8(12): e1000571. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000571 A large fraction of the world’s most widespread and problematic pathogens, such as the influenza virus, seem to persist in nature by evading host immune responses by inducing immunity to genetically and phenotypically plastic epitopes (aka antigenic variation). The more recent re-emergence of pandemic influenza A/H1N1 and avian H5N1 viruses has called attention to the urgent need for more effective influenza vaccines. Developing such vaccines will require more than just moving from an egg-based to a tissue-culture–based manufacturing process. It will also require a new conceptual understanding of pathogen–host interactions, as well as new approaches and technologies to circumvent immune evasion by pathogens capable of more genetic variation. This paper discusses these challenges, focusing on some potentially fruitful directions for future research. Vaccines often take between 16 and 20 years to develop, and the challenge now is to understand deceptive imprinting better and to systematically identify and characterize deceptive epitopes and low-efficiency, interfering epitopes in influenza and other viruses. Progress would enable targeting of both immunodominant deceptive epitopes and low-efficiency epitopes for genetic modification. In addition, more studies are needed to determine whether such genetic modifications can actually lead to significantly greater vaccine efficacy, but there is great promise in these understanding-driven approaches.

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    A team of researchers found a way to make a vaccine that is effective against many different types of Influenza by increasing the bodies natural defenses against the flu instead of introducing it to just one strain.  They did this by increasing the amount of REDD-1 expressed in cells. http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2011/11/04/north-texas-researchers-creating-ultimate-flu-shot/

Colin Gerber at Quora Visit the source

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There are a couple things to know about viruses before this question can be answered.  1.  Not all viruses are alike.  Viruses can be composed of DNA (single-stranded or double-stranded), or RNA (single or double stranded).  2.  The genetic material of viruses mutates quickly 3.  Viruses composed of RNA  mutate much faster than DNA viruses because they lack the proofreading enzymes associated with DNA replication.  Since influenza is a RNA virus, it is constantly changing.  This is why there are new flu vaccines every year.  The smallpox virus is a double-stranded DNA virus which was declared eradicated in 1979; it's eradication may not have been possible if it were composed of RNA that mutates much quicker. This is an excellent article that goes into more detail about the challenges faced by the influenza virus, and the hope and science for more efficient influenza vaccination for the future. http://harvardmagazine.com/2010/01/discovery-facilitates-universal-flu-vaccine

Bethany MacCarter

One way to make vaccines more effective generally is through the use of adjuvants. These are immune system modulating compounds that can be formulated with an antigen to shape and augment the immune response. Diseases that have resisted traditional vaccines may be controlled through the use of novel adjuvants though research in this area is just beginning to yield useful advances.

Garrett Poshusta

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