A key ingredient for a universal flu vaccine may come from llamas

The LA Times article seems like the best of the bunch.

I was thinking isitcuredyet.com but the domain is already parked.

If the inside parts have more to do with the functioning of the virus (which is what one might guess from hearing that they are more conserved), could targeting them with antibodies bias viral evolution towards colds turning deadly as opposed to slight changes in their shell proteins?

The really terrible pop-sci write-up says because the antibodies are smaller. The actual publication doesn't given a reason for using llamas. The rationale discussed doesn't hold together, either, since nothing in the study is about "small ab penetrating deeper."

To quote the actual study:

"Moreover, most vaccine-induced antibodies are directed against the highly variable head region of hemagglutinin (HA) and are strain specific. However, broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) targeting influenza HA have been isolated and characterized (8). Several bnAbs have entered clinical trials as therapeutic agents, but their use in influenza prophylaxis remains elusive because of the incomplete coverage against circulating human influenza A and B viruses, which necessitates administration of a bnAb cocktail, and the need for multiple, high-dose injections for protection throughout the entire influenza season. High serum bnAb levels are required because of poor distribution to the upper airways. We present an alternative strategy for long-lasting protection in which single-domain antibodies (sdAbs) (9) with influenza A or B reactivity are linked together into a multidomain antibody (MDAb) and expressed at the nasopharyngeal mucosa through the intranasal administration of a recombinant adeno-associated virus (AAV) vector (10, 11) encoding the MDAb transgene."

Their whole point was to take Ab that target highly-conserved regions and link them together into a, let's call it, multi-tool ab that has a variety of ways of hitting highly conserved regions.

Nothing at all about that approach suggests using "smaller ab" to "penetrate deeper." It's true camelids produce single-domain antibodies which are much smaller than the multi-domain antibodies humans use, but that wasn't the goal of the study: on the contrary, using peptide linkers to string together ab sounds like it accomplishes quite the contrary.

I think the actual rationale is: "we wanted to string together a bunch of different antibodies to maximize the likelihood of our construction finding a target, and human ab are so big that if we string them together it'll be useless - so we strung together a bunch of small, highly targeted ab, whose final size will still be small enough to allow the multi-headed hydra to interact with viruses."

Try having kids?

Those lucky fruit flies and llamas.

Not my field, but based on what I know of the quality of research in this lab and the fact that it was published in Science, I would be very surprised if the results aren't very solid and reproducible.

This fad is getting old, pharmacology has little trouble with reproducibility.

Few early-stage trials make it to market, but that's an entirely different matter. The treatment they developed, and published in a highly regarded journal, almost certainly works as described. That's a very different beast from a treatment that will be effective in humans to the high standards we hold modern drugs to.

Very rarely will this stuff get past trials.

cough 4 cough

Right, that I think I understand. However, maybe we could do better by eliminating micro-plastics from the food chain and having health guidance that isn’t written by big sugar, big fat, and big agro? Why do we have to inject new manufacturered drugs into the entire population? Where’s the limit with vaccines? Should all viruses and bacteria be eliminated through vaccine? I’ve never seen a drug without a side effect so while I am pro-vax for things like polio and even chickenpox, I really do wonder where the imperative is for flu. We can likely make much greater strides in general numbers by simply providing free access to mental health practitioners. Heck, I bet even returning the US House of Representatives to a 100,000 count per would have meaningful results on the public’s welfare, and that doesn’t require injections!

Some flu strains also appear to work either better or just as well on the healthier people, including the 1918 flu, because they can trigger a nasty autoimmune cascade, and at that point, your healthy immune system becomes a nasty liability.