Let’s put black on white: According to the World Health Organization, up to 650,000 people die each year from respiratory diseases related to seasonal flu. This is truly terrible because it means that every year all the world’s societies wait patiently to be affected by the seasonal epidemic, taking in more than half a million people.

It’s not because they did nothing, understand me well; that this is not enough. And even though we’ve been touching the solution with our fingertips for years… We just couldn’t do it. Now the North American NIH believes they have found the universal vaccine against the disease. It’s in human testing and here’s what we know about it.

What happens to us with the flu? That’s a very logical question: the scientific community got to work and was able to find a vaccine against the coronavirus in record time. Why did it fail with something like the flu we’ve known for a long time? To answer this, the first thing is to keep in mind that it is difficult to end a disease. In fact, in all of human history we have only been able to eradicate two: smallpox (1980) and rinderpest (2011).

It’s not just a matter of finances and technology, diseases also have a lot to say. All “disappearance candidates” have some things in common, but the main thing is that their natural reservoir is only and only humans (or, in the case of diseases such as rinderpest, the animal reservoir is an easily identifiable species). . . This means that they are diseases that have trouble bypassing the barriers between species and are easy to track in open ecosystems.

At the very least, with our technological, health, and social development, “only on a technically acceptable scale can we undertake the eradication of diseases that we can identify, monitor and intervene”. And the flu isn’t in that club: It’s a disease with incredible leaping ability among birds, horses, and pigs. Not only that, it’s a disease that has the incredible ability to create new subtypes in animals and then return to humans. With this in mind, we can say that the flu is not a disease that can be eradicated, without fear of being wrong in the near future.

Can we at least check it out?. Yes, but it is very difficult. And I’m not exaggerating: the annual vaccination campaign is one of the most ambitious health programs ever run. The World Health Organization maintains a worldwide network of monitoring centers to determine which strains are in circulation each year and which have the greatest growth potential. With this information, a vaccine is produced that covers the subspecies most likely to become epidemic. But WHO is wrong and sometimes the dominant subtype becomes another. In those years, the usual efficacy of the vaccine was between 40% and 60%, but as in 2008, there are vaccines with efficacy below 25%.

In search of a universal vaccine. “Finding flu vaccines that can provide long-term protection against a wide variety of seasonal flu viruses, as well as those with pandemic potential, will be invaluable public health tools.” It’s actually a very high value. This seems like the only viable alternative to truly fighting the disease.

The fact is that we have not yet succeeded in bringing it to life. And we’ve spent years trying to find a factor stable enough to go with it in all subtypes of the virus. We don’t understand it.

Candidate for the first division. Or maybe it’s more interesting to say we didn’t find it. That’s because a research team at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is beginning a phase 1 trial in humans to test a new universal flu vaccine.

BPL-1357, as it is named, is a multivalent whole virus vaccine containing inactivated copies of four specific strains of influenza (H1N9, H3N8, H5N1, and H7N3). The aim is to cover the maximum possible subtype spectrum, and preclinical studies with mice and ferrets have shown that two doses of the vaccine can provide 100% protection against lethal doses of six different strains of influenza. Fabulous data that needs to be verified in humans.

It’s early but there are good feelings. Phase I trials are very small trials (100 people in this case) and their main task is to know if the drug can make it to phase 2. This is a slow path and is not the first universal vaccine to reach human trials. Hit But there are good vibes: we’re talking about a solid technological approach, and the data are promising. All that remains is to cross your fingers and hope that science and technology “works its magic”.

Image | Steven Cornfield