Sanofi's H5N1 Vaccine May Offer Cross-Protection Against Other Strains

Some good news on the vaccine front as one of the leading pharmaceutical companies Sanofi Pasteur has announced that early trials of their H5N1 vaccine has proven effective at warding off other H5N1 strains from different countries. This is a potentially important development as it addresses one of the biggest concerns we all have about human vaccinations in the face of a pandemic. With H5N1 slowly mutating, nobody knows for sure what a pandemic-inducing strain of H5N1 is going to look like.

"This is a milestone for vaccine development ... This tells us that stockpiling does make sense ... It gives us another avenue of pandemic preparedness"

Therefore it is critical that we have some degree of assurance that a human vaccine distributed in one country will protect against an H5N1 strain found in another. Sanofi's trial involved 300 volunteers who were vaccinated with the now industry-standard Vietnamese 2004 H5N1 strain, and the antibodies of those volunteers proved effective against strains found in Turkey and Indonesia. While all of this sounds very encouraging, everyone is still being cautious about making any definitive cross-protection claims.

"We don't know enough right now to make any blanket statements about cross protection," said Dr. John Treanor, a flu vaccine expert at the University of Rochester.

Potential pandemic vaccine protects against different H5N1 bird flu strains [IHT]

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Sanofi's H5N1 Vaccine May Offer Cross-Protection Against Other Strains

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