[ad_1]
Vaccines usually protect you against a single, specific illness. They give the immune system a heads-up about what that invader will look like, so your cells are ready to leap into action.
Some, though, do something a little different.
For instance, researchers noticed during the pandemic that people who received the BCG vaccine against tuberculosis—which is not recommended in the U.S. but is commonly used in countries where the disease is endemic—had extra protection against COVID-19. That meshed with decades of observations that the shot prevents a smattering of other diseases. While the vaccine itself has a mixed success rate, the way it works has piqued scientists’ interest: BCG revs up the innate immune system, it turns out, which is not specific to a given pathogen, and provides broad, albeit low-level, protection against many different infections.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
So, could there be a way to make a more comprehensive vaccine—one that protects against many viruses and bacteria at once? In a new paper in Science, researchers describe a vaccine, given in four doses of nasal spray, that prevented mice from being infected by flu, COVID-19, SARS, and a bacterium that causes respiratory infections. The findings will need to be confirmed and the vaccine approach tested in other animals, including humans, before its true significance is clear. But the study provides a tantalizing glimpse of a fundamentally different, far-reaching way of preventing disease.
A curious mix of ingredients
The goal was to stimulate immune pathways similar to those triggered by BCG, without including a live bacterium, as that particular vaccine requires, says Bali Pulendran, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University and an author of the new study. Accordingly, the new vaccine contains a cocktail of substances intended to stimulate several aspects of the immune system.
When the researchers gave the treatment to…
[ad_2]
