U.S. scientists are examining flu antibodies taken from elderly survivors of the devastating 1918 pandemic to gain insights into the virus and study its immune response for possible similar future outbreaks.
Img: The Oakland Municipal Auditorium in use as a temporary hospital, 1918 flu pandemic. Credit: Public Domain.
Researchers at Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt University Medical Centre, in Nashville, TN, are examining the antibodies for their potential to act as vaccines amid concern that a similar pandemic to that of 1918, which killed an estimated 50 million people, could once again sweep the planet.
The team has instigated research into possible ways of providing an effective immune response.
The team, led by James Crowe Jr., M.D., professor of Pediatrics and director of the Vanderbilt Program in Vaccine Sciences, Christopher Basler, Ph.D., at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and Eric Altschuler, M.D., Ph.D., at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-New Jersey Medical School, collected blood samples from 32 original pandemic survivors aged 91-101 years and found that all reacted to the 1918 virus, suggesting that they still possessed antibodies.
The virus had been resurrected in 2005 from the bodies of people killed in the outbreak by researchers from Mount Sinai and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C. The bodies, and the virus, had been preserved in the permanently frozen soil of Alaska.
"It's incredible. The Lord has blessed us with antibodies our whole lifetime," said study co-author Dr. Eric Altschuler at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in New Jersey to AP. "What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger."
However the scientists found not only have the antibodies survived in the subjects examined, but they have mutated and bound themselves more tightly to disease cells, making them stronger and more effective. The team is hoping to use the same technique to increase the potency of vaccines against potential pandemics such as bird flu.
The results of the research have been published in the journal Nature.
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