A new vaccine may be able to provide some protection against all strains of influenza.

Current immunizations create antibodies that target a specific piece of a molecule on the surface of the virus that researchers call its “head.” That piece of the hemaglutinin protein evolves very quickly, which is why you have to get a different flu shot each year as new types of flu develop.

The next-generation vaccine causes antibodies to go after a piece of the hemaglutinin that changes less often and that is present in many influenza strains. Researchers are calling them “headless HA” vaccines, and they could be the key to a universal flu shot.

Mice immunized with the new vaccine survived a flu that killed unprotected mice.

“Our results suggest that the response induced by headless HA vaccines is sufficiently potent to warrant their further development toward a universal influenza virus vaccine,” Peter Palese of Mt. Sinai Medical School, who led the effort, said in a press release. “Through further development and testing, we predict that a single immunization with a headless HA vaccine will offer effective protection through several influenza epidemics.”

The early research appears in the new open access journal mBio. In a commentary accompanying the paper, two Italian researchers suggested that many other types of disease that currently require multiple vaccines may soon have broader solutions.

“Is influenza the only disease that warrants approaches for universal vaccines? Clearly it is not,” wrote Antonio Cassone of the Instituto Superiore di Sanità in Rome and Rino Rappuoli of Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics.

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