So the problem we were
trying to address in this work is really
just making flu vaccines better,
so you know we have annual flu vaccines
be cause the virus mutates every year
and so the antibodies that you made
in response to last year's vaccine
may or may not protect you
against next year's virus.
So what we and many others in
the field are trying to do
is come take steps towards
what's called a universal flu vaccine
that could provide protection
against a very broad variety
of influenza viruses.
Including next years,
the two major antigen surface
antigens of influenza
viruses are hemagglutinin
and neuraminidase hemagglutinin
is kind of like the coronavirus spike.
It's the protein that binds
to a receptor on yourselves
and then facilitates entry of the virus
by merging the viral membrane
with the host cell membrane.
Hemagglutinin is also
the major antigen in commercial
traditional influenza vaccines and.
Antibodies against the hemagglutinin
are what provide protection
are broadly protective.
Influenza vaccines are based on
a computationally designed
nanoparticle platform
that we've developed here
at the Institute for Protein Design.
What these nanoparticles do is
they repetitively array
the antigen, the protein from the virus
that you're trying to Mount,
an immune response to.
Repetitively arraying
that antigen tells the immune system
that this is something dangerous,
so repetition is actually viewed
by the immune system as a danger signal,
viruses themselves or symmetric
repetitive arrangements of proteins,
bacterial cell walls
have repetitive chemical elements,
so your immune system has evolved
to respond strongly to repetition.
So what we did was
we took our computationally
designed nanoparticles.
It's kind of like
playing Legos with proteins.
We programmed them to
to assemble to very specific structures.
And we attach the hemagglutinin
on the surface of those nanoparticles
to Mount a robust response.
The next trick we played, however,
was we took advantage
of the unique capability
of our nanoparticle platform to Co.
Display multiple
different hemagglutinin's
on the same particle.
And what we found is that either
nanoparticle vaccine format
gave responses against the current
seasonal influenza strains
that were equivalent.
Or perhaps just a touch superior
to current commercial vaccines?
That's very important
from a regulatory perspective.
You need to be at least as good
as the standard of care,
but the special thing
what we saw in addition was that
we got much broader responses,
and these broader responses
were protective, so the vaccines actually
protected against
H5 N 1 bird flu or age
7 in nine influenza viruses.
Whereas current
commercial vaccines did not.
So we're thinking we
these vaccines may be
what you might call
a super seasonal vaccine.
I vaccine that protects
for more than one year, right?
We're provides high level, high efficacy
protection across multiple years.
The key takeaway
is that this virus provides
really good protection
against seasonal strains
and potentially broader protection
against next years strain.
Or even you know 3-4 years from now.
So that's the one key
takeaway, what we're doing next
is we're actually evaluating
that this vaccine in a phase one
clinical trial that will begin
that's scheduled to begin
next month at the NIH.
So this entire project
has been in close collaboration
with researchers
at the NIH's Vaccine Research Center.
Specifically, the labs of Barney Graham
and Masaru Kaneko.