{"id":100015,"date":"2019-12-22T08:23:37","date_gmt":"2019-12-22T16:23:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/12\/new-clues-about-why-a-universal-flu-vaccine-is-so-elusive"},"modified":"2019-12-22T08:23:37","modified_gmt":"2019-12-22T16:23:37","slug":"new-clues-about-why-a-universal-flu-vaccine-is-so-elusive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/12\/new-clues-about-why-a-universal-flu-vaccine-is-so-elusive","title":{"rendered":"New clues about why a universal flu vaccine is so elusive"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/new-clues-about-why-a-universal-flu-vaccine-is-so-elusive2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Every year, we\u2019re reminded to return to the pharmacy for a flu shot. Why can\u2019t we have a flu vaccine that offers long-term protection, like those for measles or polio? That\u2019s because the influenza virus continuously evolves, so the immune response we build up one year might not work the next year\u2014or even on the version of the flu you catch the same year. As a result, the virus remains dangerous: last year, it caused more than 60,000 deaths in the United States alone.<\/p>\n<p>New findings, published in <i>Cell<\/i>, reveal why making a general-purpose vaccine that guards against all versions of the flu is so hard: Instead of improving its memory of the previous version of virus, the <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/immune+system\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">immune system<\/a> develops its response to the new virus variant from scratch, mostly using <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/immune+cells\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">immune cells<\/a> that have no memory of the virus.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf we can figure out how to help the immune system to keep building on what it has already learned, we could develop better vaccines for highly evolving viruses like the flu, or HIV, or Hepatitis C,\u201d says Gabriel D. Victora, assistant professor at Rockefeller.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Every year, we\u2019re reminded to return to the pharmacy for a flu shot. Why can\u2019t we have a flu vaccine that offers long-term protection, like those for measles or polio? That\u2019s because the influenza virus continuously evolves, so the immune response we build up one year might not work the next year\u2014or even on the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":511,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/511"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100015\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}