Suprising Study of Human Immune Responses Could Lead to Better Flu Vaccines

November 21, 2014

(Wired) – Scientists make this season’s flu vaccine based on the strains of the virus that circulated during the last flu season. It’s a flawed approach, but it’s the best they can do given that it takes months to make the vaccine, and there’s no way—at least not yet—to predict how the virus might evolve in the interim. But a new computer modeling study suggests the human immune system has a better memory than scientists had thought for strains of the flu it’s encountered in the past. In the future, the researchers say, it might be possible to exploit this to design better vaccines.