"A speedy new way to make antibodies to flu could provide a treatment within weeks of the onset of a pandemic.
At present flu vaccines take at least six months to produce after a new strain appears. A faster life-saving strategy might be to treat people with antibodies produced by earlier patients. The main antibody-secreting cells take up to four weeks to appear, but there is a transient burst of another kind of antibody-making cell a week after infection.
Now a team at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, has isolated these early cells from people injected with an ordinary flu vaccine and discovered that the antibodies they make attack that strain of flu (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature06890). What's more, they were able to make masses of purified "monoclonal" antibodies from the cells within a few weeks, a process that takes months using the later cells.
The team is checking whether potentially pandemic flu, such as H5N1, also induces such early antibodies."
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