- Scientists are making a vaccine that could give lifelong
protection against all types of flu in a single jab.
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- Currently, at risk people in the UK - the elderly and
ill - need annual flu jabs, and there is no jab available yet guaranteed
to beat bird flu.
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- Biotechnology firm Acambis, in Cambridge, the UK, says
it hopes its jab will target numerous mutations that presently allow flu
to evade attack.
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- However, the work is very early and is years off being
tested in humans.
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- One-off jab
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- Each year winter flu kills around 4,000 people in the
UK.
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- Globally, between 500,000 and one million people die
each year from influenza.
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- If the bird flu virus currently circulating in Asia were
to mutate and spread from person to person it could kill as many people
as the 1918 Spanish flu, which claimed between 20 and 40 million lives,
experts have warned.
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- Current flu vaccines work by giving immunity to two proteins
called haemagglutinin and neuraminidase, which are found on the surface
of flu viruses.
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- However, these proteins keep mutating which means doctors
have to keep making new vaccines to keep up.
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- Scientists at Acambis' laboratory in the US, together
with Belgian researchers at Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology,
are focusing their efforts on a different protein, called M2, which does
not mutate, as well as other technology that they cannot disclose yet for
commercial reasons.
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- Early days
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- If successful, a single shot of the vaccine could protect
a person against all strains of influenza virus, they believe.
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- Dr Thomas Monath, chief scientific officer at Acambis,
said: "We aim to avoid the need for annual re-engineering and manufacture
of the new product, something that is not yet possible with existing vaccines.
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- "The need to develop a new vaccine each time a different
influenza strain emerges often results in long delays before a population
can be protected.
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- "The technology also has special importance as a
potential means of protecting human populations against pandemic influenza
strains."
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- So far the vaccine has only been tested in animals. The
scientists said it would take several years before large-scale human trials
could be done.
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- Professor Maria Zambon, a flu expert at the Health Protection
Agency, said: " We welcome advances in the process of developing novel
flu vaccines and vaccination techniques.
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- "However this vaccine is still very early in a vaccine
development pipeline and it will take some time to establish how this vaccine
performs in human trials and whether it can proceed to being licensed for
use in the UK."
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- Professor Karl Nicholson, professor of infectious diseases
at Leicester University, said: "It would be enormously helpful to
mankind to have just the one vaccine but sadly I think it is a long way
off."
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- He said it might be 10 years before any such product
could be ready for widespread use in humans.
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- © BBC MMV
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- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4747909.stm
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