This year's flu shot might not work as well as in previous years, so focus is now on a new vaccine created in Connecticut.
All flu vaccines share a common goal: getting the body to make antibodies. "Those antibodies will then help you later when the real flu comes around," said Manon Cox, president and CEO of Protein Sciences, a Meriden-based company that develops vaccines.
Cox said there are different ways to trick a body into generating those antibodies. For more than 70 years, doctors grew the flu virus in chicken eggs, killed it, and injected its proteins into patients. But what if it was possible to grow those proteins without the need for for eggs and dead-flu viruses?
That's the idea behind Flublok, which won FDA approval in 2013. "What we do is we take that genetic information, we insert it in a vehicle, and then program cells to produce only that protein," said Cox. "In other words, we don't grow influenza viruses. We produce the protein, the 'coat,' of the virus."
Since this method doesn't grow the actual flu virus, Cox said the vaccine can be more concentrated, filled with more antigen proteins that "trick" the body into producing more flu-fighting antibodies. She said that makes Flublok a heartier vaccine in years like this, when flu mutations have undercut the strength of more commonly-prescribed vaccines like the flu shot.
Last month, that heartiness prompted Representatives Elizabeth Esty and Rosa DeLauro to co-sign a letter to the Centers for Disease Control urging the agency to order 250,000 more of the Flublok vaccines. "I've been having conversations with the CDC," Cox said. "They felt it was too late in the season for them to be able to deploy any of that vaccine, so I'm not sure whether that's going anywhere."
Cox said insurance usually covers Flublok, but finding the right place to get the vaccine can still sometimes be tricky. On January 14, East Haven will hold a Flublok clinic at the library on Main Street.
