NES ZIONA, ISRAEL--BiondVax announced today that priming with universal flu vaccine before boosting with a conventional bird flu H5N1 vaccine (containing a single strain from Clade 1) resulted in mice exhibiting a significantly higher level of immunity to the strain contained in the conventional bird flu vaccine and in addition, broadened immunity to other H5N1 flu strains (from Clade 2). Bird flu viruses are classified into two main families, Clade 1 and Clade 2. Conventional pandemic bird flu vaccines are strain-specific and therefore trigger immunity predominantly against the particular virus contained within the vaccine, either Clade 1 or Clade 2.
In our most recent study, we show that this limitation of conventional bird flu vaccines can be overcome by priming with BiondVax’s universal flu vaccine, as mice administered BiondVax’s universal vaccine and then the conventional pandemic bird flu vaccine exhibit immunity to multiple bird flu strains from both clades. Indeed, BiondVax’s universal flu vaccine contains viral regions common to diverse strains, including H1N1 (swine flu), H5N1 (bird flu) and H7N9 (bird flu), and so can enhance all kinds of conventional strain-specific flu vaccines when administered in a prime-boost regimen: first the universal flu vaccine is administered (primer) and then a few weeks later the seasonal or pandemic flu vaccine is administered (boost). Furthermore, this new study confirms our earlier finding that priming with BiondVax’s universal flu vaccine overcomes another challenge of pandemic preparedness, namely the difficulty in supplying enough conventional bird flu vaccine to the population in time. For priming with BiondVax’s universal flu vaccine enables one instead of two conventional bird flu doses per person to be sufficient.
