(Press-News.org) An antibody that mimics features of the influenza virus's entry point into human cells could help researchers understand how to fine-tune the flu vaccine to protect against a broad range of virus strains. Such protection could potentially reduce the need to develop, produce, and distribute a new vaccine for each flu season.
A multi-institutional team led by Stephen C. Harrison, PhD, chief of the Division of Molecular Medicine at Children's Hospital Boston, report their work and its implications for improving influenza vaccination this week in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
With each passing season, the two primary components of the influenza virus's outer coat, neuraminidase and hemagglutinin (the annual flu vaccine's primary target), mutate, allowing the virus to dodge any anti-flu immunity an individual may have generated in previous years. This evasion strategy, called antigenic drift, is why a new flu vaccine is necessary every year, a process that can take upwards of seven months.
From a public health perspective, an ideal influenza vaccine would protect against multiple strains of the virus, regardless of their hemagglutinin structure. The antibody, discovered by Harrison's collaborators at Duke University Medical Center and called CH65, gives new insights into how the immune system's response to hemagglutinin evolves over time, knowledge that could guide the development of just such a vaccine.
The researchers started with cells donated by an individual who received the flu vaccine for 2007. From those cells, they used genomic tools to generate a suite of antibodies, including CH65, that bound to and neutralized hemagglutinin from several seasonal flu strains. CH65 alone could bind to and neutralize hemagglutinin from 30 of the 36 strains tested.
"While it's unusual to find such broadly effective antibodies to the flu virus, they may actually be more common than we realize," noted Harrison, who is also an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. "What this tells us is that the human immune system can fine-tune its response to the flu and actually produce, albeit at a low frequency, antibodies that neutralize a whole series of strains."
CH65 mimics many key aspects of sialic acid, hemagglutinin's natural receptor, and binds to portions of hemagglutinin that the virus cannot mutate without reducing its ability to infect human cells. After comparing CH65 with other antibodies produced from the donor's cells, the team was able to deduce how the donor's anti-flu immune response had evolved to produce such broadly reactive antibodies as a consequence of multiple virus exposures over time.
With this knowledge, Harrison believes it may be possible to develop vaccines that actively direct the immune response to provide broad protection against multiple strains of the influenza virus, ideally by targeting the same portions of hemagglutinin as CH65.
"Developing a flu vaccine is currently a hit-or-miss enterprise," according to Harrison. "We vaccinate with a virus or part of a virus and hope that the immune response will evolve in a useful direction.
But for viruses like influenza that mutate rapidly," he continued, "we want to have a response that does a really good job at blocking both the strain of the virus in the vaccine and many related strains as well. These results point out what strategies we might employ to achieve that goal."
###
This study was supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the US Department of Energy, and the National Center for Research Resources and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health.
Children's Hospital Boston is home to the world's largest research enterprise based at a pediatric medical center, where its discoveries have benefited both children and adults since 1869. More than 1,100 scientists, including nine members of the National Academy of Sciences, 12 members of the Institute of Medicine and 13 members of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute comprise Children's research community. Founded as a 20-bed hospital for children, Children's Hospital Boston today is a 395 bed comprehensive center for pediatric and adolescent health care grounded in the values of excellence in patient care and sensitivity to the complex needs and diversity of children and families. Children's also is the primary pediatric teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School. For more information about research and clinical innovation at Children's visit the Vector blog.
END
PITTSBURGH—Traditional motion capture techniques use cameras to meticulously record the movements of actors inside studios, enabling those movements to be translated into digital models. But by turning the cameras around — mounting almost two dozen, outward-facing cameras on the actors themselves — scientists at Disney Research, Pittsburgh (DRP), and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have shown that motion capture can occur almost anywhere — in natural environments, over large areas and outdoors.
Motion capture makes possible scenes such as those in "Pirates of the Caribbean: ...
PITTSBURGH, Aug. 8 – Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have identified a molecular pathway that helps explain how an enzyme elevated in asthma patients can lead to increased mucus production and inflammation that is characteristic of the lung condition. Their findings, reported online in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveal unique interactions between biological molecules that could be targeted to develop new asthma treatments.
An enzyme called epithelial 15-lipoxygenase 1 (15LO1) metabolizes fatty acids to produce ...
Athens, Ga. – Increased seawater temperatures are known to be a leading cause of the decline of coral reefs all over the world. Now, researchers at the University of Georgia have found that extreme low temperatures affect certain corals in much the same way that high temperatures do, with potentially catastrophic consequences for coral ecosystems. Their findings appear in the early online edition of the journal Global Change Biology.
Lead author Dustin Kemp, a postdoctoral associate in the UGA Odum School of Ecology, said the study was prompted by an abnormal episode ...
Boulder, CO, USA - Highlights from the September issue of GEOLOGY, which is now online, include debris flow hazard assessment; dune migration in the "greatest desert on Earth": Antarctica; Luizi, the first confirmed meteorite impact structure in Central Africa; a determination of the likelihood that fungal disease had accelerated latest Permian woodland deterioration; the first comprehensive compilation of sedimentary and historical records of ash-fall events in northern Europe; and high-speed video of ash fall from the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption.
Keywords: Mariana ...
Boulder, CO, USA - An international team of researchers has found the strongest evidence yet that parts of North America and Antarctica were connected 1.1 billion years ago, long before the supercontinent Pangaea formed.
"I can go to the Franklin Mountains in West Texas and stand next to what was once part of Coats Land in Antarctica," said Staci Loewy, a geochemist at California State University, Bakersfield, who led the study. "That's so amazing."
Loewy and her colleagues discovered that rocks collected from both locations have the exact same composition of lead isotopes. ...
By 2012, an estimated 14 million people will serve as distance caregivers to family members who live across the state, across the region, even across the country.
"No longer are families living just around the corner from each other," says Polly Mazanec, an assistant professor at the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing and an advance practice oncology nurse at University Hospitals Case Medical Center's Seidman Cancer Center.
The distance presents a challenge as family members work to gain information about their loved ones and participate in their cancer care. But ...
Social class is more than just how much money you have. It's also the clothes you wear, the music you like, the school you go to—and has a strong influence on how you interact with others, according to the authors of a new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. People from lower classes have fundamentally different ways of thinking about the world than people in upper classes—a fact that should figure into debates on public policy, according to the authors.
"Americans, although this is shifting a ...
Will graphic cigarette package warning labels significantly reduce demand? A new study suggests it will.
Current US policy requires that tobacco companies cover 50 percent of one side of a cigarette pack with a text warning. But the FDA recently unveiled nine new cigarette warning labels, which include graphic images of lung and mouth cancer, to be unveiled in September 2012.
A sample of 404 adult smokers from four states participated in an experimental auction on cigarette packs with four different kinds of warning labels. All packs carried the same message: smoking ...
The use of GPS technology to monitor sex offenders should be viewed as a tool rather than a control mechanism, a team of researchers at Sam Houston State University found in a recent study.
In "Examining GPS Monitoring Alerts Triggered by Sex Offenders: The Divergence of Legislative Goals and Practical Applications in Community Corrections," Dr. Gaylene Armstrong and Beth Freeman examined the affects of a state law in Arizona that required the lifelong GPS monitoring of adult sex offenders convicted of dangerous crimes against children and placed on community supervision. ...
PITTSBURGH—A new tactile technology developed at Disney Research, Pittsburgh (DRP), called Surround Haptics, makes it possible for video game players and film viewers to feel a wide variety of sensations, from the smoothness of a finger being drawn against skin to the jolt of a collision.
The technology is based on rigorous psychophysical experiments and new models of tactile perception. Disney will demonstrate Surround Haptics Aug. 7-11 at the Emerging Technology Exhibition at SIGGRAPH 2011, the International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques ...
