Centivax and the Universal Flu Vaccine

Remember the variants? And vaccines that keep changing and don’t work so well? It’s not just COVID and coronaviruses, but flu, malaria, HIV and herpes/shingles too.

This happens because the pathogen is constantly mutating most of its surface coat proteins to evade our immune system — it keeps looking different. But there is an invariant element to each, and if we could only guide our immune system to see that signal in the noise, we’d have a “universal vaccine” for all variants, both known and unknown. Imagine a single flu shot that worked well every season and would also work for new variants, even scary ones like H5N1 bird flu, weaponized flu or the Spanish Flu were it to reemerge. It could end pandemics. It might even eradicate certain pathogens altogether, as we did with smallpox.

This has been a holy grail in vaccine development, one that I have philanthropically supported for many years (but those engineered nanoparticle approaches failed). Meanwhile, Centivax may have figured it out. Their approach has worked beautifully in many animal species, and human trials have just begun. We will know soon because there is a quick HAI assay that can evaluate the vaccine’s breadth of efficacy.

"For decades, flu vaccination has been reactive," said Sawsan Youssef, PhD, founder and Chief Science Officer of Centivax. "A universal influenza vaccine allows us to be proactive—moving from annual guesswork to predictable durable response."

“Beyond its flagship universal flu program, Centivax’s epitope-focusing platform is advancing a growing pipeline spanning a pan-herpes Alzheimer’s preventative, a broad oncology treatment, a malaria vaccine, and a universal antivenom recently published in Cell” — news today

Yeah, one universal antivenom shot for all snake species. It should also work for a variety of parasites: viral, bacterial, protozoan, even fungal outbreaks for the Last of Us. One shot to end each of them.

And an Alzheimer’s preventative? If we can avoid infection by herpesvirus and flu, large natural experiments suggest that this would be neuroprotective for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. It may prove to be the most effective treatment for dementia and neurodegeneration. See below for details.

Fingers crossed that this works in the current flu trials, and then, applying it more broadly, Centivax may end the pandemic era.