Anicet Mbida 06:52, January 11, 2023

Anicet Mbida delivers to us every morning what is best in terms of innovation.

This Wednesday, he is interested in the flu vaccine which is on the way to becoming universal.

A bite should make it possible to be immunized definitively.

The innovation of the day, we've been talking about it for a while.

But this time, there it is.

We're finally getting close.

This is the universal flu vaccine.

It will be exactly like tetanus, measles or polio.

All you have to do is get stung once and you'll be immune forever.

You know that today, you have to get vaccinated every year, because the flu virus mutates.

It is constantly changing.

It is therefore a game of cat and mouse: when the vaccine has been found for a particular strain, the work must be started again as soon as a new one appears.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have found a simpler solution: a vaccine capable of targeting, at the same time, the twenty types of mutations that recur regularly.

This will help protect us, whatever strain of flu we might encounter.

Does that amount to making a vaccine that targets 20 different viruses at the same time?

How it is possible ?

Thanks to the famous messenger RNA.

We talked about it a lot during the Covid.

It is this technique where we will simply send a message to your body so that it manufactures, on its own, a particular antibody.

Well, the researchers managed to program the message to make twenty different antibodies.

The technique has been successfully tested on ferrets (the reference animals for influenza).

They produced a high level of antibodies for months.

So it works!

The results have just been published in the famous journal Science.

This is very promising compared to current techniques.

Because until now, we were rather trying to attack a region of the virus which would always remain the same between mutations.

But the results were never conclusive.

It would seem that an all-out attack, on about twenty mutations, is more effective.

For how long would we be protected by such a vaccine?

Between 5 and 10 years.

And we remind you, against all forms of flu, existing and future.

As a result, it will be less restrictive to get vaccinated: a shot every 5 - 10 years, this could reconcile some people with vaccination.

It is recalled: in France, more than one in two people at risk is not vaccinated against the flu today.