Scientists have identified three types of vaccine-induced antibodies that can neutralize diverse strains of influenza virus that infect humans. The discovery will help guide development of a universal influenza vaccine, according to investigators at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), both part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and collaborators who conducted the research. The findings appear in the July 21st online edition of Cell.
All animals begin life as a single cell from which arise the many different cell types, such as heart, lung, blood, etc., that are specific to that type of animal. However, once the process of cell differentiation has led to many different tissues, each organism has a new, opposite imperative – keeping new cells in each type of tissue the same as their brethren. Cancers arise in a tissue when a cell becomes different from its neighbors and thus represent a failure to maintain this critical uniformity.




