There are signs that one bid to create a universal flu vaccine that would provide protection against all strains of flu is working. And this one might pack some extra evolutionary aces up its sleeve.
The flu vaccines humanity now has at its disposal work only against a few kinds of flu, for a short time. Ordinary seasonal flu continually evolves and changes its surface proteins, so it can get round our immunity to last year's virus, and last year's vaccine. Therefore we constantly need to update flu vaccines and be re-vaccinated to keep from getting flu.
This is more than just a nuisance. Producing vaccine tailor-made for each new flu virus is such a long,clumsky process that when a really novel virus emerges unexpectedly and goes pandemic, it can kill without a hindrance for months before a vaccine is ready.
We didn't have significant quantities of vaccine against the 2009 swine flu until after the first, and nearly all of the second, waves were already in the Americas.
To overcome this problem, several research groups are trying to make a flu vaccine out of proteins that are the same in all flu viruses, but to which people don't normally mount much of an immune response, in the hope that this will protect us from all flu once and for all.
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