Researchers focused on creating next flu vaccine

Early each year, a group meets to discuss which strains to include in the next vaccine, and they have to decide quickly. It can take between six and nine months to make more than 150 doses of the vaccine.

Dr. Kristen Delaney-Nguyen worked on a flu virus vaccine 10 years ago while at Wake Forest University. She was interested to know why this year's strain is so deadly, so she ran the numbers and discovered the mutation rate of this year's virus.

"For every single virus that infects a cell, you get about 80 mutant variances in the offspring," she said. "So, you'll have about 6,000 offspring total and 80 of them will have a mutation."

Nguyen says this year's strain of the virus has been particularly deadly because it has a mutation rate five times greater than expected.

"Then these mutants will go on to infect new cells and develop more and more mutations and so it's really difficult to get a vaccine against a target that's always changing," she said.

The future of finding cures for illnesses like the flu will be in the hands of students like Brittany Anderson. Last year, the Fayetteville State University biology major discovered a once unknown bacteriophage in soil.

She hopes discoveries like hers lead to treatments for patients without the use of antibiotics.

"That specific phage can kill that infection versus antibiotics. You take it, yeah it kills the infection but you also have side effects. But with bacteriophages you won't have...you know the advantage is you won't have side effects," Anderson said.

Dr. Nguyen in confident that this year's team of researchers will come up with a vaccine for next season's flu bug. But, she admits it going to be tough.

"It's a little bit of guess work. So, they base that on what strain we're seeing right now in high numbers because those are the ones most likely to be present in October when influenza season starts back up," Nguyen said.

Nguyen recommends that everyone get the flu shot.