Google-funded trials of a universal flu jab have already begun

Creating a flu vaccine can be a surprisingly imprecise science. Twice a year the World Health Organization meets to decide which flu strains will be protected against by that year’s vaccine; once in February for the northern hemisphere flu season, and again in September for the southern hemisphere. If they include the right strains, then as many as 70 or 80 per cent of people who receive a flu shot will be protected against illness. If they don’t, that figure can be considerably lower.

But Tom Evans, CEO of Oxford-based vaccine manufacturers Vaccitech, wants to do away with some of that uncertainty. He’s currently trialling a universal vaccine that aims to immunise people against all strains of one of the most major forms of the influenza virus, type A, in a single shot. By combining his universal vaccine with the kinds of vaccines already recommended by the WHO, Evans thinks he can boost the number of people protected against type A strains by as much as 50 per cent.

A £20 million cash injection raised in a Series A funding round led by GV (the venture capital arm of Google parent company Alphabet), Sequoia China, and existing backer Oxford Sciences Innovation will be split between each of the firm’s major projects and will keep the company going until 2019, by which point the flu vaccine should be nearly ready for the final stages of clinical trials.

“The flu this season can vary from last season by a little bit or a lot,” he says. Conventional flu vaccines target a specific protein on the surface of a flu virus, but these proteins come in 18 different flavours, each denoted by a single ‘H’ number. Remember the global ‘swine flu’ outbreak in 2009? That was caused by the H1N1 virus. This year, ‘Aussie flu’, strain H3N2, might hit the UK particularly hard, after causing one of the worst Australian flu seasons in the last decade.

It’s difficult to predict which strain of flu will be prevalent in each flu season, and since each flu vaccine only works against its specific strain it’s nearly impossible to ensure that you vaccinate everyone against every strain they’re likely to be exposed to. Evans and his team are hoping that by targeting proteins within the virus, which are the same no matter what strain it is, they can seriously boost the efficacy of existing vaccines.

The universal vaccine is currently entering the second year of a two-year trial involving more than 2,000 people. Depending on the results of the trial, Evans and his team hope to eventually partner with a company that manufacturers conventional flu vaccines, and combine their products to create a more effective vaccine. “Nobody has taken [this kind of vaccine] to the stage that we’ve taken this to,” says Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute at Oxford University and board director of Vaccitech.

Flu outbreaks are still a huge health problem globally, resulting in the deaths of between 250,000 and 500,000 people every year. And the possibility of a global pandemic has still not receded, particularly if a strain starts spreading that isn’t protected against by that year’s vaccine. In 1918, a flu pandemic killed an estimated 50 million people around the world, and smaller pandemics in 1957 and 1968 each killed millions. Evans doesn’t rule out another epidemic of those proportions happening again. “There’s nothing to prevent another flu pandemic,” he says. Yet.

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