by Terrence Aym

Created on: February 07, 2011

With bird flu, swine flu and recent evidence of dozens of mutations of the parent viruses facing the, harried medical researchers have been playing catch up on worldwide pandemic threats for more than a decade.

Now a brilliant team of medical researchers at Oxford University in the United Kingdom have had an unqualified success with a new vaccine that holds the promise of wiping out all forms of the influenza virus on the face of the Earth.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention out of Atlanta, Georgia, more than 35,000 Americans die annually from various forms of the flu virus. Worldwide, the fatality numbers soar into the millions while billions more fall ill.

Vaccine targets ubiquitous viral proteins

The British team developed a universal vaccine that will eradicate this scourge by targeting a group of proteins that are critical to the functioning of every flu virus.

Dr. Sarah Gilbert at Oxford's Jenner Institute led the team of medical researchers that created the vaccine targeting the proteins. The breakthrough effectively negates the virus's ability to mutate making it the most powerful weapon in the medical arsenal against the influenza virus.

Professor Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute told the UK Guardian that "The problem with flu is that you've got lots of different strains and they keep changing. Occasionally one comes out of wildfowl or pigs and we're not immune to it. We need new vaccines and we can't make them fast enough."

All previous flu vaccines rely upon proteins that sit on the outside of a flu virus (the H and N on strains such as H1N1 and H3N2) to encourage the immune system to create antibodies able to recognize and attack the invading virus. The weakness in that approach has always been the targeted proteins—they are dissimilar across different strains and may mutate making the vaccine in use ineffective.

The new process focuses exclusively on two proteins inside the virus that are virtually ubiquitous across all the influenza strains, even future mutations.

Lives, time and money saved

This stunning breakthrough may also eliminate the need to research and develop treatments and vaccines for new types of flu. And the new vaccine will greatly reduce the expenditures that governments must allocate to protect their countries from virulent flu pandemics.

"If we were using the same vaccine year in, year out, it would be more like vaccinating against other diseases like tetanus," Gilbert explained. "It would

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