Vaccine fighting all viruses finally created

UC Riverside researchers have created a novel vaccine employing RNA, that is safe for use by immunocompromised individuals and effective against all strains of the virus.

Each year, scientists attempt to forecast which four influenza strains will be most common in the forthcoming flu season. 

And each year, in the hopes that the experts have created the injection accurately, individuals wait in line to receive their updated vaccination, according to SciTech Daily.

Similarly, Covid vaccines have been redesigned to focus on sub-variants of the most common strains that are now in circulation in the US.

This novel approach targets a portion of the viral genome shared by all virus strains, thus it would not be necessary to produce all these distinct doses.

A report released today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describes the vaccine, how it works, and a demonstration of its efficacy in mice.

"What I want to emphasise about this vaccine strategy is that it is broad,” said UCR virologist and paper author Rong Hai. 

"It is broadly applicable to any number of viruses, broadly effective against any variant of a virus, and safe for a broad spectrum of people. This could be the universal vaccine that we have been looking for."

Additionally, the researchers say there is little chance of a virus mutating to avoid this vaccination strategy. 

"Viruses may mutate in regions not targeted by traditional vaccines. However, we are targeting their whole genome with thousands of small RNAs. They cannot escape this," Hai said.

Moreover, the researchers believe they can “cut and paste” this strategy to make a one-and-done vaccine for any number of viruses.

"There are several well-known human pathogens; dengue, SARS, Covid. They all have similar viral functions," Ding said, adding that "this should be applicable to these viruses in an easy transfer of knowledge."