Posted on 05/23/2013 10:32:31 AM PDT by neverdem
Self-assembling nanoparticles could make updating seasonal vaccines easier.
Under the microscope, they look like simple jacks, with eight spikes jutting out of a central ball. But these protein nanoparticles are science's latest weapon against influenza: a new breed of flu vaccine that provides better and broader protection than commercially available ones — at least in animal tests.
Current flu vaccines use inactivated whole viruses and must be regularly remade to target the strains most likely to cause illness in the coming year. But the new nanoparticles would require fewer updates because they induce the production of antibodies that neutralize a wider range of flu strains. They could even protect against varieties of flu that have not yet emerged.
“This is taking us on the road to a universal vaccine,” says Gary Nabel, now at the biotechnology firm Sanofi in Cambridge, Massachussetts, who led the work in his former lab at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland. The results are published on Nature's website today1.
Stronger protection
The self-assembling nanoparticles can be made in the lab without having to grow real viruses in eggs or cell cultures, a time-consuming step of commercial vaccine preparation. “In theory, a new version could be produced quickly once a new pandemic virus had been identified, or a new seasonal variant started to circulate,” says Sarah Gilbert, a vaccine researcher at the University of Oxford, UK, who was not involved in the work.
Team member Masaru Kanekiyo created the nanoparticles using haemagglutinin (HA), one of the major antigenic proteins in a flu virus’s coat, and ferritin, an iron-transporting protein that naturally forms spherical clusters. He fused these two proteins in such a way that the HA–ferritin complexes automatically assembled into a structure with a 24-piece ferritin core from which protruded eight...
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
Ping
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I worry about vaccines as they fiddle with the immune system and this has the possibility of leading to auto-immune responses....
I am for Vaccines for the really deadly crap... But a vaccine for the sniffles.... No thanks..
The flu is much worse than just the sniffles.
I am for Vaccines for the really deadly crap... But a vaccine for the sniffles.... No thanks..
Sniffles?
Over 30,000 people die from flu each year in the US alone.
What could go wrong?
Just about everything. Auto immune diseases as they morph out of control, causing the immune system to treat everything as the enemy...
Isn’t that called a cytokine storm?
Current understanding about autoimmune diseases rests on an organism's inability to recognize self. Many believe that is because our environment is now too clean. Some call it the hygiene hypothesis.
The 'hygiene hypothesis' for autoimmune and allergic diseases: an update.
Into the eye of the cytokine storm.
That's the usual description of what happened 90 plus years ago with the Spanish Flu. Check Table 1.
Thanks for the links. The second link is going to take me a while. :)
Thanks!
This one gives a lot to think about. The highly immunogenic parts of HA are the ones that tend to mutate from year to year, and the parts that don’t mutate are not very immunogenic. I also wonder what species the ferritin is from, and if the ferritin moiety is immunogenic.
Anyway, interesting concept. I wonder how it will hold up through the interminable process of animal and clinical trials.
The trials will be interesting to say the least. It’ll be a year or so until we see a possible Cutter Incident.
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