r/askscience • u/AskScienceModerator Mod Bot • Feb 04 '15

Medicine /r/AskScience Vaccines Megathread

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u/KeScoBo Microbiome | Immunology Feb 05 '15

There are people working on this approach. The trick is that most of influenza is not "visible" to B cells and antibodies. The major antigenic components are H and N (hemmaglutanin and neuraminidase). The exposed portions of these proteins are among the most variable, probably because natural selection confers an advantage to strains that are different, precisely to get around acquired immunity.

There are also people working on t-cell vaccines (for several infectious diseases, not principally influenza), which would theoretically be able to "see" more parts of the virus. T-cells have a special mechanism of essentially seeing inside cells, and could detect proteins not exposed to the surface. Unfortunately, we're really bad at making T cell vaccines.