The recent outbreak of avian influenza in Asia is a timely reminder of the ever present possibility of a human influenza pandemic in the near future. Work continues to develop vaccines effective against emergent influenza strains, but another component of effective prevention and infection control programs is the ability to administer vaccine in a timely and efficient manner. Even in the absenc...

The live attenuated influenza vaccine (LAIV) is preferentially recommended for use in most children yet remains unsafe for the groups most at risk. Here we have improved the safety of a mouse-adapted live attenuated influenza vaccine containing the same attenuating amino acid mutations as in human LAIV by adding an additional mutation at PB1 residue 319. This results in a vaccine with a 20-fold...

Seasonal influenza vaccine formulation efforts struggle to keep up with viral antigenic variation. Two studies now report engineered or naturally occurring human antibodies targeting the influenza hemagglutinin (HA) stem, with exceptional neutralizing breadth (Joyce et al., 2016; Kallewaard et al., 2016). Antibodies with similar structural features are elicited in multiple subjects, suggesting ...

The influenza virus is a human pathogen that causes epidemics every year, as well as potential pandemic outbreaks, as occurred in 2009. Vaccination has proven to be sufficient in the prevention and containment of viral spreading. In addition to the current egg-based vaccines, new and promising vaccine platforms, such as cell culture-derived vaccines that include virus-like particles (VLPs), hav...

Zoonotic influenza H7 viral infections have a case fatality rate of about 40%. Currently, no or limited human to human spread has occurred, but we may be facing a severe pandemic threat if the virus acquires the ability to transmit between humans. Novel vaccines that can be rapidly produced for global distribution are urgently needed, and DNA vaccines may be the only type of vaccine that allows...

Background: Influenza is an acute respiratory illness that can cause hospitalization, and confers a high mortality rate, especially in high-risk groups. Influenza vaccination for hospital staff can play an effective role in controlling nosocomial flu infections. The purpose of this study was to investigate causes of non-vaccina...

The conventional, currently available vaccines against influenza virus, though quite successful, suffer from a few shortcomings; one major limitation is their restriction to the specific strains that are included in the vaccine. We review herewith some of the more recently developed influenza vaccines and further describe our own results on the design of epitope-based vaccine for human use. In ...

BACKGROUND Influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 virus has been circulating in human population for three epidemic seasons. During this time, monovalent pandemic and trivalent seasonal influenza vaccination against this virus have been offered to Finnish healthcare professionals. It is, however, unclear how well vaccine-induced antibodies recognize different strains of influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 circulating in th...

background and aims: each year, the influenza virus causes moderate to severe infections with a high prevalence throughout the world. accordingly, an influenza vaccine that ensures protection with only a single dose would be a much more cost effective approach to influenza prophylaxis. generation of influenza non-replicating virus-like particles (vlp) in baculoviral expression system is an attr...

BACKGROUND The immune-related evolution of influenza viruses is exceedingly complex and current vaccines against influenza must be reformulated for each influenza season because of the high degree of antigenic drift among circulating influenza strains. Delay in vaccine production is a serious problem in responding to a pandemic situation, such as that of the current H1N1 strain. Immune escape i...