How far have we reached in development of effective influenza vaccine?

Abstract

Despite of ongoing research programs and numerous clinical trials, seasonal influenza epidemics remain a major concern globally. Vaccination remains the most effective method to prevent influenza infection. However, current flu vaccines have several limitations, including limited vaccine capacity, long production times, inconsistence efficacy in certain populations, and lack of a “universal” solution. Different next-generation approaches such as cell line-based culture, reverse genetics, and virus expression technology are currently under development to address the aforementioned challenges in conventional vaccine manufacture pipeline. Such approaches hope for safe and scalable production, induce broad-spectrum immunity, create premade libraries of vaccine strains, and target nonvariable regions of antigenic proteins for “universal” vaccination. Here, we discuss the process and challenges of the current influenza vaccine platform as well as new approaches that are being investigated. These developments indicate that an exciting future lies ahead in the influenza vaccine field.

Keywords:

• Baculoviruses
• cytotoxic T-lymphocyte
• influenza
• M2 protein
• vaccine

Declaration of Interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (Malaysia, FRGS/1/2015/SG05/UNIM/03/1; FP005-2013B), the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOSTI02-02-12-SF0256), the Prototype Research Grant Scheme (Malaysia, PRGS/2/2015/SG05/UNIM/03/1), and the University of Malaya (PG116-2012B and RU018-s2015).