By Stephen Beech via SWNS
Personalized flu jabs are a major step nearer following a significant breakthrough.
Researchers have developed a way of classifying an individual person’s ability to resist infection – known as host immunity – which they say will make vaccine programs more effective.
They believe the discovery may lead to the early identification of those who will not respond well to a regular vaccine schedule – and therefore allow them to receive different vaccine doses to provide them with long-lasting immunity.
It will not only reduce flu-related illness but also slash the logistical and financial burden it causes to healthcare systems, say scientists.
Influenza causes serious illness in three to five million people worldwide each year and 650,000 deaths,.
The effectiveness of flu vaccines varies considerably between individuals depending on vaccine types and individual circumstances.
A person’s ability to resist infection plays an important role, say scientists.
Dr. Nhan Nguyen and his colleagues took blood samples from 286 healthy donors aged 18 to 81 during four flu seasons to try to identify those who would be unprotected against influenza after vaccination.
Dr. Nguyen said: “After examining their pre- and post-vaccination antibody status, we used multiomics technology to identify proteins and metabolites that could serve as predictive markers for the identification of individuals who have low levels of protection even after vaccination.
“This is a more sophisticated way of identifying such people than that which is used at present, where protection is assessed solely by changes in the number of antibodies in the blood pre- and post-vaccination.”
The flu vaccine is updated every year in response to variations in the virus, which Dr. Nguyen said means that the pre-vaccination antibody level can differ in individuals due to previous infection or their vaccination history.
He says the current vaccine response calculation may therefore not provide host-specific information that is sufficiently accurate to estimate a person’s immune response or vulnerability to future infections, as some already have high antibody levels before the jab that don’t change significantly after they have received it.
The results were consistent over the four flu seasons and the four different updates of the flu vaccines.
Dr. Nguyen said: “Each seasonal influenza vaccine is designed to protect against three or four different flu viruses, so a lot of factors are involved in an individual’s vaccine response.
“We aimed to identify the robust signals of response that spanned across different influenza seasons and were consistent despite the variations in the response of the same individual to different flu viruses.”
The researchers hope that the biomarkers they have identified as being related to an individual’s vaccine response will enable the development of personalized flu jabs.
They say the biomarkers in turn will reduce the cost of vaccine response screening, as well as increase protection against infection.
Dr. Nguyen, of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, Germany, said: “We are now testing a molecule that could act potentially as a predictive biomarker as well as a modulator of influenza vaccine response.”
He added: “We are also exploring the possibility of developing a market product such as a diagnostic test based on our results.
“And we hope to further explore the idea of personalized influenza vaccination based on the biomarkers we have identified in this study.”
Dr. Nguyen is due to present the findings at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics in Berlin, Germany, on Monday [June 3].
Conference chair Professor Alexandre Reymond welcomed the findings.
Reymond, of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, said: “Personalised health is all about identifying the fraction of individuals of the population who are at risk in order to be able to treat them specifically.”
“Importantly, this will benefit these individuals and decrease the burden on the health system, which in turn will benefit everybody.”
