German scientists develop faster flu vaccine

New flu vaccine German scientists have developed a new flu vaccine which can be produced in just a few weeks. Tests on mice show that immunization also works in young and old rodents, but it could take years before tests for a human vaccine are carried out.
Researchers at the Friedrich-Loeffler Institute (FLI), Germany's Research Institute for Animal Health, in collaboration with biotech company CureVac, have developed the new type vaccine. It is based on messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA), which controls the production of proteins. This study isn't the first of it's kind, there were attempts as early as fifteen years ago to create a similar vaccine but it was too difficult to stabilize mRNA at the time.
The new vaccine has so far been successfully tested on mice, ferrets and pigs. Mice showed remarkable immunity against the flu for their whole lives, according to the findings recently published in the journal "Nature Biotechnology." The synthetic vaccine also takes less time to produce - a few weeks compared to six to nine months for conventional vaccines, which are grown in chicken eggs or cell cultures. "For a conventional vaccine, one has to isolate the virus, cultivate it and let it grow until there are large amounts," FLI head of immunology Lothar Stitz told DW. “For this synthetic vaccine, we only need the genetic information of the viruses,” he added.
Every year, the World Health Organization compiles a list of viruses that are the most likely to spread and drug companies produce vaccines based on the organization’s assumptions. The synthetic vaccine could also be useful for people who are allergic to chicken proteins. They normally have a severe reaction to conventional flu shots whereas alternative DNA vaccines do not have the same effect; however some scientists fear that DNA vaccines could disrupt gene regulation by changing human DNA.