Brain inflammation from Alzheimer's disease.
Alzheimer's is a terrible disease that robs a person of their personality and memory before eventually leading to death. It's the sixth-largest killer in the U.S. and, currently, there are 5.8 million Americans living with the disease.
Wang's vaccine is a significant improvement over previous attempts because it can attack the Alzheimer's protein without creating any adverse side effects.
It devastates people and families and it's estimated that Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia will cost the U.S. $290 billion dollars this year alone. It's estimated that it will become a trillion-dollar-a-year disease by 2050.
There have been over 200 unsuccessful attempts to find a cure for the disease and the clinical trial termination rate is 98 percent.
Alzheimer's is caused by plaque deposits that develop in brain tissue that become toxic to brain cells. One of the major hurdles to finding a cure for the disease is that it's impossible to clear out the deposits from the tissue. So scientists have turned their attention to early detection and prevention.
One very encouraging development has come out of the work done by Dr. Chang Yi Wang, PhD. Wang is a prolific bio-inventor; one of her biggest successes is developing a foot-and-mouth vaccine for pigs that has been administered more than three billion times.
Mei Mei Hu
Brainstorm Health / Flickr.
In January, United Neuroscience, a biotech company founded by Yi, her daughter Mei Mei Hu, and son-in-law, Louis Reese, announced the first results from a phase IIa clinical trial on UB-311, an Alzheimer's vaccine.
The vaccine has synthetic versions of amino acid chains that trigger antibodies to attack Alzheimer's protein the blood. Wang's vaccine is a significant improvement over previous attempts because it can attack the Alzheimer's protein without creating any adverse side effects.
"We were able to generate some antibodies in all patients, which is unusual for vaccines," Yi told Wired. "We're talking about almost a 100 percent response rate. So far, we have seen an improvement in three out of three measurements of cognitive performance for patients with mild Alzheimer's disease."
The researchers also claim it can delay the onset of the disease by five years. While this would be a godsend for people with the disease and their families, according to Elle, it could also save Medicare and Medicaid more than $220 billion.
"You'd want to see larger numbers, but this looks like a beneficial treatment," James Brown, director of the Aston University Research Centre for Healthy Ageing, told Wired. "This looks like a silver bullet that can arrest or improve symptoms and, if it passes the next phase, it could be the best chance we've got."
"A word of caution is that it's a small study," says Drew Holzapfel, acting president of the nonprofit UsAgainstAlzheimer's, said according to Elle. "But the initial data is compelling."
The company is now working on its next clinical trial of the vaccine and while hopes are high, so is the pressure. The company has already invested $100 million developing its vaccine platform. According to Reese, the company's ultimate goal is to create a host of vaccines that will be administered to protect people from chronic illness.
"We have a 50-year vision -- to immuno-sculpt people against chronic illness and chronic aging with vaccines as prolific as vaccines for infectious diseases," he told Elle.
[Editor's Note: This article was originally published by Upworthy here and has been republished with permission.]
Thanks to safety cautions from the COVID-19 pandemic, a strain of influenza has been completely eliminated.
The flu shot, explained
Influenza viruses type A and B are responsible for the majority of human illnesses and the flu season.
Centers for Disease Control
For more than a decade, flu shots have protected against two types of the influenza virus–type A and type B. While there are four different strains of influenza in existence (A, B, C, and D), only strains A, B, and C are capable of infecting humans, and only A and B cause pandemics. In other words, if you catch the flu during flu season, you’re most likely sick with flu type A or B.
Flu vaccines contain inactivated—or dead—influenza virus. These inactivated viruses can’t cause sickness in humans, but when administered as part of a vaccine, they teach a person’s immune system to recognize and kill those viruses when they’re encountered in the wild.
Each spring, a panel of experts gives a recommendation to the US Food and Drug Administration on which strains of each flu type to include in that year’s flu vaccine, depending on what surveillance data says is circulating and what they believe is likely to cause the most illness during the upcoming flu season. For the past decade, Americans have had access to vaccines that provide protection against two strains of influenza A and two lineages of influenza B, known as the Victoria lineage and the Yamagata lineage. But this year, the seasonal flu shot won’t include the Yamagata strain, because the Yamagata strain is no longer circulating among humans.
How Yamagata Disappeared
Flu surveillance data from the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID) shows that the Yamagata lineage of flu type B has not been sequenced since April 2020.
Nature
Experts believe that the Yamagata lineage had already been in decline before the pandemic hit, likely because the strain was naturally less capable of infecting large numbers of people compared to the other strains. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the resulting safety precautions such as social distancing, isolating, hand-washing, and masking were enough to drive the virus into extinction completely.
Because the strain hasn’t been circulating since 2020, the FDA elected to remove the Yamagata strain from the seasonal flu vaccine. This will mark the first time since 2012 that the annual flu shot will be trivalent (three-component) rather than quadrivalent (four-component).
Should I still get the flu shot?
The flu shot will protect against fewer strains this year—but that doesn’t mean we should skip it. Influenza places a substantial health burden on the United States every year, responsible for hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and tens of thousands of deaths. The flu shot has been shown to prevent millions of illnesses each year (more than six million during the 2022-2023 season). And while it’s still possible to catch the flu after getting the flu shot, studies show that people are far less likely to be hospitalized or die when they’re vaccinated.
Another unexpected benefit of dropping the Yamagata strain from the seasonal vaccine? This will possibly make production of the flu vaccine faster, and enable manufacturers to make more vaccines, helping countries who have a flu vaccine shortage and potentially saving millions more lives.
Founder Lewis Hornby and his grandmother Pat, sampling Jelly Drops—an edible gummy containing water and life-saving electrolytes.
When Lewis Hornby visited his grandmother at her nursing home afterward, he learned that dehydration especially affects people with dementia, as they often don’t feel thirst cues at all, or may not recognize how to use cups correctly. But while dementia patients often don’t remember to drink water, it seemed to Hornby that they had less problem remembering to eat, particularly candy.
Where people with dementia often forget to drink water, they're more likely to pick up a colorful snack, Hornby found. alzheimers.org.uk
Hornby wanted to create a solution for elderly people who struggled keeping their fluid intake up. He spent the next eighteen months researching and designing a solution and securing funding for his project. In 2019, Hornby won a sizable grant from the Alzheimer’s Society, a UK-based care and research charity for people with dementia and their caregivers. Together, through the charity’s Accelerator Program, they created a bite-sized, sugar-free, edible jelly drop that looked and tasted like candy. The candy, called Jelly Drops, contained 95% water and electrolytes—important minerals that are often lost during dehydration. The final product launched in 2020—and was an immediate success. The drops were able to provide extra hydration to the elderly, as well as help keep dementia patients safe, since dehydration commonly leads to confusion, hospitalization, and sometimes even death.
Not only did Jelly Drops quickly become a favorite snack among dementia patients in the UK, but they were able to provide an additional boost of hydration to hospital workers during the pandemic. In NHS coronavirus hospital wards, patients infected with the virus were regularly given Jelly Drops to keep their fluid levels normal—and staff members snacked on them as well, since long shifts and personal protective equipment (PPE) they were required to wear often left them feeling parched.
In April 2022, Jelly Drops launched in the United States. The company continues to donate 1% of its profits to help fund Alzheimer’s research.