Drug Widens Immunity to Flu | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views
www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/37940/title/Drug-Widens-Immunity-to-Flu/
immunity flu science research
shared by grayton downing on 29 Oct 13
- No Cached
-
drug rapamycin paradoxically helped to protect mice against a diverse range of influenza viruses after the animals were vaccinated against just one flu strain.
-
many subtypes and strains of influenza, which evolve at great speed and often hybridize into entirely new strains. Current flu vaccines cannot protect against all of these strains, which forces scientists to try and predict those most likely to cause problems in the coming year.
-
In treated mice, the B cells produced a more diverse repertoire of antibodies, which targeted different parts of the incoming viruses, including regions that are conserved across many strains. This provided protection against flu viruses regardless of strain.
- ...3 more annotations...
-
cross-reactive antibodies bind relatively weakly to their targets and, under normal circumstances, would probably get outcompeted by antibodies with a narrower focus but higher affinity. “For whatever reason, antibodies to the conserved regions are very rare,”
-
possible to skew the response towards more broadly cross-reactive antibodies, in mice, in a particular situation,”
-
not advocating that we use rapamycin [in humans],” said McGargill. However, her group’s discovery could point to other ways of achieving the same effect, perhaps by manipulating the immune system into producing more cross-reactive antibodies. “Maybe instead of trying to enhance the immune response, we need to dampen it a little bit, and allow it to be more diverse,