Photo: Morguefile
With fall around the corner, we will all start to see those pop-up signs at our local pharmacy: “Flu Shots Here.” Unfortunately, a flu shot/vaccine does not guarantee your protection all fall/winter and even spring/summer long. There are thousands of different strains of flu that have the capability of mutating. But good news could be right around the corner.
According to reports and studies in Nature Medicine, two teams of researchers have created vaccines that lay the foundation for long-lasting protection.
In layman’s terms, they introduced a combination of mutations to stabilize the core of the hemagglutinin stem.
Ian Wilson, co-author on the Sciencepaper and a structural and computational biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California said in Science Magazine, “It’s a promising first step, and it’s very exciting to see this research come to fruition.”