Following years in which the flu vaccine hasn’t worked well, a team of researchers, including scientists from the University of Texas Medical Branch, have identified ways to make the shot more effective.
To prepare a vaccine for flu season each year, the World Health Organization recommends the needed influenza vaccine to match the predominant strains of the virus in circulation. However, it takes about six months to produce the vaccine, and by the time it reaches the public, it may no longer guard against evolving viruses, said Slobodan Paessler, director of Galveston National Laboratory Preclinical Studies Core.
Usually, the flu vaccine is about 50 percent to 70 percent effective. But in the last flu season, it was about 20 percent effective, and Slobodan said this year could be similar.
“Last year was a pretty bad year,” Paessler said. “This year it could be very similar.”
In a paper published in Frontiers in Microbiology in December, Paessler and other researchers argue a new bioinformatics approach could be more effective than the current method. The current genetic analyses used to monitor virus evolution can’t predict important mutations in the flu virus that have an effect on how well vaccines work, Paessler said.
In its research based on bioinformatics, the team proposes focusing on the part of the virus responsible for binding to cells. Scientists could still identify the predominant strains as well as some outliers that would be resistant to the seasonal vaccine, Paessler said.
“The goal is to combine real-time data and register changes in the genome that are important for the function of the virus protein and to go away from the classical model that has failed year after year,” he said. “This new model allows you to know when some major change occurs and allows you to start preparing new vaccines.”
Other authors of this study include Veljko Veljkovic, Sanja Glisic, Jelena Prljic, Vladimir R. Perovic and Nevena Veljkovic from the Center for Multidisciplinary Research and the VINCA Institute of Nuclear Sciences at University of Belgrade; and Matthew Scotch from the Department of Biomedical Informatics and the Center for Environmental Security, Biodesign Institute and Security and Defense Systems Initiative at Arizona State University, according to a medical branch news release.
Contact reporter Chacour Koop at 409-683-5241 or chacour.koop@galvnews.com.