Beating two infections with one vaccine
By Ben Harder
From Baltimore, Md., at the Annual Conference on Vaccine Research
Identifying key similarities between related bugs could enable researchers to coax some vaccines to do double duty.
Immunity to one virus sometimes confers protection against a related microbe. Such cross-protection is the case with cowpox and smallpox, and a vaccine currently in use for Japanese encephalitis protects some animals against the closely related West Nile virus.
Cross-protection could occur in part because related viruses share many molecular parts that trigger immune cells to attack, says Anne S. De Groot of Brown University and the company EpiVax, both in Providence, R.I.