Science News Review

What’s New on the Swine Flu Vaccine Front

Jun 8 at 7:07pm by Aileen

The World Health Organization Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response Update as of June 5 is maintaining the pandemic alert at Level 5 for the time being, but seeking input from members for fine-tuning the system to account for virulence and other factors not currently considered. The system should be more receptive to the severity of outbreaks in different countries or regions to better characterize to the public and public health officials worldwide to monitor the actual situation in their areas in order to avoid excessive response or not enough response.

In the meantime, the mortality rate of this flu, while initially high in the Mexico City area, has fallen overall to around 2% or less, in line with annual deaths during flu season. Those who contract the virus are still those generally considered to be in the healthiest range of the population. On the vaccine development front there have been several developments since the 2009 Swine Flu epidemic began:

On April 29 vaccine researchers at St. Louis University announced that they’d accomplished the first step in developing a universal vaccine against pandemic influenza. To accomplish this the researchers used proteins (engineered a ‘bug’ that produced said proteins from genetic sequences coding for them) from both A and B influenza strains. The vaccine introduces those proteins so the body can engineer antibodies specific to them. More testing is needed, they say, before the vaccine is ready for prime time.

On May 1 Juergen A. Richt, a pathobiologist at Kansas State University’s college of veterinary medicine released findings that the current lineage of H1N1 Swine Flu is a descendant of the 1918 strain that killed more than 20 million people worldwide. For the study Richt and colleagues from Canada, USDA and Mount Sinai engineered their ‘bug’ in a biosafety-level-4 lab (like the one at UT-Austin) at the National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease in Canada using elements from both the 1918 virus and a 1930 descendent of that virus.

On May 22 researchers at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Vaccine Research announced that they’d evoked a robust immune response with a vaccine made of virus-like particles [VLPs], which are just the protein coats of actual viruses without any genes inside. This approach, which like other approaches involves genetic manipulation to produce the “hollow” virus shells, may work better than attenuated virus vaccines. The new vaccine for Human Papilloma Virus is a VLP.

And finally, on June 4 Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News reported that scientists around the world are accelerating efforts to develop an effective vaccine against the current Chimera strain. This is ‘news’ in the GE/biotech community because genetic manipulation is standard operating procedure in the development of influenza vaccines, of any type – live, attenuated, killed and dissociated or VLP. Step #1 is to engineer your Chimera.

No matter how the Chimera came to be, Bellerophon is engineered very much on purpose. I personally like the idea of the VLP vaccine, as it ONLY has coat proteins and it excites a more robust immune response to those than to dissociated coat proteins. The robust response is to the form of the viral shell. Even better, if these beasties get out in an ‘oops’ it won’t kill anybody – it’ll just immunize ‘em. Let’s all hope one of these is available come September.