VACCINE
Continued from Page 16
outside of viruses and prevent them from attaching to
their target cell. If a virus cannot attach to its target cell,
then it cannot infect that cell. While this process works
well for viruses that don’t change their outer appearance
(like poliovirus), focusing the immune system’s memory
on the outside of the virus turns out to be an Achilles’
heel for influenza vaccines. This is because the outside of
the influenza virus is the part of the virus that changes
the most. The influenza virus is constantly evolving its
outside appearance, making our current vaccines con-
tinually chase the virus as it changes over time. The new
approach we are proposing will instead teach T-cells, the
assassins of our immune system that kill infected cells,
to target the guts of the virus, which are fixed and cannot
change their appearance. I imagine this new approach as
training a bull (our immune system) to ignore the waving
red cape (the outside of the virus) that the matador is
waving, and instead charge directly at the matador. While
this might sound unrealistic, the approach is rooted
in more than 10 years of research by our collaborative
research team’s greater ability to develop a vaccine plat-
form based on cytomegalovirus, a common, mostly harm-
See Vaccine / Page 19
Courtesy of CDC
Family Practice
Infant to
Elderly
Eagle Cap Clinic, PC
Randy Alanko, MD
Physician and Surgeon
Allyson Howarth
DNP-FNP-C-WHNP-BC-MA
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