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posted by cmn32480 on Monday December 05 2016, @12:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the this-could-be-helpful dept.

A team of researchers at Peking University has developed a new type of vaccine that they claim may allow for a new approach to generating live virus vaccines which could conceivably be adapted to any type of virus. In their paper published in the journal Science, the team outlines the means by which they modified an influenza virus causing it to incite an immune response without a risk of infection.

Most vaccines today contain viruses that have been killed or weakened to the point that they are unlikely to cause an infection when injected into a healthy patient. Such vaccines work by causing the immune system to target similar viruses if found in the body before they have a chance to multiply, causing an infection. Unfortunately, in some cases, people with weak immune systems have found themselves experiencing a full-blown infection from a vaccine. In this new effort, the researchers took a new approach to creating a vaccine—modifying an influenza virus in such a way as disallow it from causing an infection in any patient.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @01:54AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @01:54AM (#437044)

    From the abstract (the paper is pay-walled), it seem like the virus doesn't contain non-natural amino acids, instead it is produced in cells that will ignore a particular termination codon and make complete viral proteins. Normal cells will not produce full-length viral proteins so the virus will only be able to replicate in engineered cells.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_genetic_code [wikipedia.org]

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @08:57PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @08:57PM (#437381)

    My guess was wrong:
    The researchers did actually use a non-natural (actually, it is used by some bacteria) amino acid that would substitute multiple positions in the normal sequence (2-8 per RNA segment to help reduce the chances of reversion to the "wild" strain). The use of a non-natural amino acid should not be necessary for efficacy or safety, so I expect its inclusion in this work is more as a proof-of-principal for future work.

    Possible next steps would be to include modified amino acids that can bias presentation of antigens that are conserved among influenza strains (for a universal vaccine) or are linked with immune system-stimulating molecules (such as cGAMP) so the vaccine would carry its own adjuvant.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjuvant [wikipedia.org]