KUALA LUMPUR, March 15 (Bernama) -- The National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) research team led by Professor Wu Suh-Chin of the Department of Medical Science has developed a vaccine providing protection against all strains of influenza.
According to a statement, the vaccination can be administered in the form of a nasal spray instead of an injection.
The team's innovative research has been published in scientific journals, and was awarded the Ministry of Science and Technology’s Future Tech Award in 2019 and 2020.
Since the prevalence of influenza and the strains involved differ from year to year, deciding on which vaccines to prepare for the next influenza season is challenging, and a wrong guess can lead to a low vaccine efficacy.
“This is mainly because the hemagglutinin of the influenza virus is constantly changing, making it difficult for our immune cells to recognise it,” noted Wu.
The hemagglutinin antigen is mainly composed of a globular head and a stem region, and it is the globular head which makes each strain of a virus unique.
Wu’s team has used genetic engineering to make the globular head grow a layer of carbohydrates; these mask its unique features, thereby refocusing the immune cells to make antibodies to whatever type of influenza virus they encounter.
The team has already used the self-adjuvanting vaccine platform, now patented in Taiwan and the United States, to develop a vaccine for avian flu, and initial experiments have confirmed that chickens which inhale the mucosal vaccine produce neutralising antibodies in their serum.
Spurred on by the encouraging results, the team is currently planning to develop a mucosal vaccine providing protection against COVID-19.
-- BERNAMA
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