Flu Vaccine

Scientists Move Closer to a Universal Flu Vaccine Researchers hope their new approach, which works well in lab animals, may save more lives By Dina Fine Maron on January 18, 2018 Credit: Roger Harris Getty Images

The flu takes a formidable toll each year. Researchers and health workers save lives by routinely rolling out seasonal vaccines and deploying drugs to fight the virus and its secondary infections. But in the U.S. alone the flu still kills tens of thousands of people and hospitalizes hundreds of thousands more. A big part of the problem has been correctly predicting what strains of the influenza virus health officials should try to combat in a given season. A team of scientists from the U.S. and China now say they have designed a vaccine that could take the guesswork out of seasonal flu protection by boosting the immune system’s capacity to combat many viral strains./.../