Trudeau scientists are working to develop vaccines that promote cellular immune responses to the flu virus and that target conserved components of the virus. The new approach would protect us from multiple stains, including avain flu and other deadly strains.

Flu infections account for approximately 200,000 hospitalizations each year in the United States and 40,000 deaths. Worldwide, flu results in three to five million severe cases and claims the lives of between half a million and a million people. These are the results of normal seasonal influenza infections. On occasion, more deadly strains arise or new influenza types emerge. One of these new strains, the avian flu, has exhibited up to 50 percent mortality among those infected. In addition, there are major concerns about the potential impact of the novel H1N1 Influenza that was first identified in Mexico. Therefore, development of more-effective and less-expensive influenza vaccines would represent a great advance in improving health in both the United States and throughout the world.

At the Trudeau Institute, we are conducting parallel studies, looking at flu infection and vaccination in both laboratory models and through our collaboration with the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego, sample material from vaccinated humans.

It is important to make the annual flu vaccine more available around the globe, more beneficial and more cost-effective. Current methods of flu vaccine development involve estimating which flu strains circulating in a given year will be the most problematic and then growing live virus. The resulting vaccines are relatively expensive, and although flu vaccine
distribution in developing nations has improved during the last decade, the majority of vaccines are still distributed primarily in the United States and Western Europe.

Trudeau scientists are working to develop vaccines that promote cellular immune responses to the flu virus and that target conserved components of the virus. Such vaccines could be produced much more quickly and less expensively than the vaccines to the whole virus.

If successful, this new approach would protect us from multiple strains of flu, including avian flu, as well as the deadlier strains that emerge periodically — every 40 to 50 years or so — that cause pandemics.

The Trudeau Institute continues to build its partnership with the U.S. Navy in the area of influenza research, specifically the search for a more-effective vaccine. Although for many healthy adults, catching the flu is a relatively minor annoyance, for others it is a life-threatening situation. Young, elderly and immune-compromised individuals are all more greatly affected by influenza infections; thus, these populations are targeted for vaccination.