Current Approaches to Universal Vaccine Against Influenza Virus

Abstract

Influenza is a seasonal infectious disease widespread across the globe. In Russia the share of influenza and other acute respiratory viral infections account for up to 90% of all infectious diseases. Scientific and reasonable method of influenza prevention is vaccination. However, traditional current influenza vaccines can’t induce protection against various virus strains that differ substantially in terms of their antigenic structure, and thus require periodic updates to its immunogenic components. In addition, there is the risk of a pandemic caused by an entirely new antigen in relation to variants of influenza virus A. Attempts to improve on traditional approaches to vaccination have focused primarily on improving production technologies and to increase immunogenicity of vaccines. Therefore, the urgent task is the creation of vaccines able to induce immune response a broad spectrum against different influenza virus strains and human strains of avian influenza, also can cause disease in humans. Protective effect of universal vaccine should be the induction of integrated immune response, based on the formulation of cross-reactive antibodies and T cells. The development of such universal vaccine could remove the need for periodical strain composition update of existing vaccines and, accor dingly, will be able to give the vaccine manufacturer itself, production planning regardless of epidemic seasons. Currently, the most widely studied antigens as key components of flu vaccines are proteins M2 and NP as well as the hemagglutinin of influenza virus. This review summarizes and lists some data of domestic and foreign research on a universal influenza virus vaccine.

Effect of M2e peptide–gold nanoparticle conjugates on development of anti-influenza antibodies

“…Nonetheless, the application of M2e in vaccine design is restricted by the need for highly immunogenic carriers. There is good reason, therefore, to develop methods for increasing M2e immunogenicity and for using N2e in combination with various stimulants of cellular immune response [10,11].…”