[Janos]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/wire/la-na-birdflu27jan27,0,1674419.story

New Bird Flu Vaccine Is 100 Percent Effective in Animal Tests
By Thomas H. Maugh II, Times Staff Writer

Pennsylvania researchers have produced a bird flu vaccine made from a genetically engineered human cold virus and shown that it protected 100 percent of vaccinated mice and chickens.

While production of a conventional flu vaccine requires months of work and large numbers of fertilized chicken eggs, the researchers reported Thursday that they prepared their vaccine in only 36 days, growing it in a laboratory dish.

The ability to produce a new vaccine so quickly could give public health officials a powerful new tool to combat the H5N1 bird flu virus if it should mutate and begin infecting humans widely.

The team is working with the Food and Drug Administration to begin human tests of the vaccine, said Dr. Andrea Gambotto of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who led the team. He said those trials could begin within weeks.

He said the vaccine should be equally effective in humans because it is based on a human virus.

Gambotto's research, conducted in conjunction with scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is scheduled to be published in the Feb. 15 issue of the Journal of Virology and was made available early online.

The Pittsburgh team worked with a human cold virus, called an adenovirus, that had been stripped of the genes required for it to cause a respiratory infection.

Using genetic data from the CDC, they constructed the gene for a bird flu protein called hemagglutinin in the laboratory and added it to the adenovirus. The hemagglutinin protein allows the bird flu virus to bind to and enter cells that it infects.

The whole process of producing the vaccine took 36 days from the time the researchers received the DNA sequence information, Gambotto said.

Mice injected with the vaccine were 100 percent protected against the bird flu virus, the team reported, while those injected only with an unaltered adenovirus all died within a few days of being exposed to the bird flu virus.

Studying the mice, the team found that the vaccine produced two types of immunity -- antibodies that block the hemagglutinin and prevent it from binding to cells, and T-cells that attack the invading virus.

"This means that this recombinant vaccine can stimulate several lines of defense against the H5N1 virus, giving it greater therapeutic value," said microbiologist Simon Barratt-Boyes of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and a member of the team.

"More importantly, it suggests that even if H5N1 mutates, the vaccine is still likely to be effective against it," he said.

When the vaccine was given to chickens as a mist administered through the nose, about half the birds were protected from the flu. But when they were injected with the vaccine, they were 100 percent protected.

"This is a very potent vaccine," Gambotto said. "The results of this animal trial are very promising."

The team is not sure why the intranasal administration was not as protective, he added.

So far, the bird flu virus has infected mostly birds, although 152 humans have contracted it and more than 80 have died, according to the World Health Organization. Experts fear, however, that the virus will mutate slightly, allowing it to infect humans more easily and leading to a pandemic.

The virus originated in southeast Asia but has now spread to other areas, including Turkey, Siberia and Kazakhstan.

Now I can molest those geese like I used to.

[IceFire]

That is VERY good news indeed.  Hopefully its useful and can be used to prevent the spread of the bird flu before it reaches any pandemic proportons.

[Janos]

That is VERY good news indeed.  Hopefully its useful and can be used to prevent the spread of the bird flu before it reaches any pandemic proportons.

It's not transmissable from human to human yet, so a true pandemic seems unlikely - unless the virus mutates. And at that point this vaccine can be completely useless (if it even works now, which remains to be seen).
But it's a good preventive measure, because every bird-to-human infection increases the chances of a human-to-human mutant morph rising.

[an0n]

I stand by my assertion that fire is the best vaccine.

[DaBrain]

You'll get a toally different oppinion about this, when you get a disease yourself. 

[an0n]

Not really. It's a vaccine. So the fire wouldn't be administered to me if I was already infected.

They should just burn down every village that gets infected. Treat it like a zombie plague.

[aldo_14]

Not really. It's a vaccine. So the fire wouldn't be administered to me if I was already infected.

They should just burn down every village that gets infected. Treat it like a zombie plague.

So, presumably you've already coated yourself in metholated spirits and are just searching for the lighter?

[an0n]

No, I'm gonna be that one guy who flees through the woods to escape the quarantine and infects hundreds of thousands of people as a result.

[aldo_14]

Tsh.  There's always one.

[IceFire]

That is VERY good news indeed.  Hopefully its useful and can be used to prevent the spread of the bird flu before it reaches any pandemic proportons.

It's not transmissable from human to human yet, so a true pandemic seems unlikely - unless the virus mutates. And at that point this vaccine can be completely useless (if it even works now, which remains to be seen).
But it's a good preventive measure, because every bird-to-human infection increases the chances of a human-to-human mutant morph rising.

Actually thats what was encouraging...they are saying that even if the virus does mutate they have a vaccine that will be somewhat effective and probably modifiable to work against it.  I realize that at the moment there is no human to human transmission and that all of the people infected have made direct contact with infected birds.  If it does mutate then it sounds like they will be ready with a counter vaccine based on the one they have already created.