BioTechniques News
Maddy Chapman
A new vaccine – produced using baker’s yeast – could provide widespread and long-term protection against evolving flu strains.
The World Health Organization (Geneva, Switzerland) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (GA, USA) monitor which flu strains are circulating each year, relying on this worldwide viral surveillance data to determine which vaccines will be most effective. But what if it didn’t matter which strains were dominant in any given year? Now, researchers from the University of Michigan (MI, USA) have developed a nanoparticle vaccine with the potential to offer universal flu protection in addition to a biological manufacturing method that could expedite pandemic response.
Following vaccination, the immune system is faced with a buffet of deactivated flu variants, mainly detecting a common viral protein that covers 80% of influenza A virions. This rapidly mutating protein is called hemagglutinin, and it’s part of the reason why we must rely on health organizations’ data to ensure the right cocktail of variants is developed into a vaccine that can protect against the dominant strains of the year.
However, when a new variant dominates flu season, like swine flu in 2009 and subclade K in 2025, the health repercussions can be severe. Instead of targeting hemagglutinin, researchers have been working on a vaccine that immunizes the body to a different viral protein: M2. This protein is conserved across influenza A viruses and is a key component of viral replication, making it less likely to mutate. Because hemagglutinin is more abundant on virions, the body doesn’t naturally target M2, so the researchers set about creating particles that only present M2, leaving the immune system no choice.
‘Universal vaccine’ may provide protection against respiratory viruses, bacteria and allergens
Researchers have invented a new vaccine that protects mice from respiratory viruses, bacteria and allergens – the closest yet to a universal vaccine.
To develop the M2 vaccine, the team genetically modified baker’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, to produce large quantities of the M2 protein, which covers particles – similar to the size of virions – that bud from the yeast. After incubating the yeast in nutrient-rich liquid, the researchers then lightly washed the yeast with mild chemicals to remove the cell walls before collecting the virus-like particles.
The yeast manufacturing system is much faster than the traditional production method, which uses chicken eggs and takes 6 months. This would allow researchers to respond quicker to an M2 variant should one emerge, improving pandemic response time.
When tested in vivo, the M2 vaccines successfully immunized mice against three flu strains.
More research is needed before we see these vaccines being used in humans, but the technology has already been licensed to a biotech company specializing in vaccine development. The research team will next explore how long M2-vaccinated mice remain immune to flu: “Our goal is to develop a broadly protective and more effective flu vaccine, so you don’t have to get a flu shot every season,” concluded Fei Wen, corresponding author of the study. “Eventually, with enough effort and research, we believe that you might need one shot to be protected for life.”
The research was presented on 24 August 2026 at the American Chemical Society Fall Conference (Chicago, IL, USA; 23–27 August 2026).
The post Taking a shot at developing a universal flu vaccine appeared first on BioTechniques.
Powered by WPeMatico