Name: Single vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flus, researchers say | BBC News
Uploaded: 2026-02-28T06:16:33.000Z
Duration: 3 min 34 s
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Researchers in the United States say that a single vaccine may be able to protect against all coughs, colds and flus, as well as some bacterial infections and even ease allergies.

The research in the journal Science tested the universal vaccine in animals.

Well, we are joined by our health and science correspondent, James Gallagher.

And James, well, to be honest, this sounds a little bit too good to be true.

Because the first question I asked when I interviewed the scientists that developed this was, is this too good to be true as well?

I suppose what they would say is that this is still just animal research.

It needs to pass the biggest hurdle of seeing if they can get the same results in people as they can in mice.

But what they've done and what has convinced lots of other scientists in the field that this is actually promising and actually a really exciting avenue of research, is that they've managed to develop a completely new way of priming the immune system to fight infection.

And so if you think of lots of the vaccines that we have at the moment, they work against one specific thing.

So we have a COVID vaccine, we have a flu vaccine, we have a measles vaccine, we have a chickenpox vaccine.

And they all train the immune system to fight one thing.

It mimics signals, the way immune cells communicate with each other just to make them a little bit more alert, more attentive, so that when any infection comes in, the they're ready to pounce.

So just in terms of we mentioned that it's not yet been trialled on humans.

That's going to be the big C if it works or not.

And that is what the researchers want to do next.

But there are lots of questions that need answering in human trials.

You'll only get that from doing those tests.

So immune systems are obviously very different between people and mouse.

There are similarities, but there are also differences.

Not least, we have, without being rude, we have had decades of exposure to different bacteria, and

that has shaped our immunity over the course of our lives.

Whereas mice do not live that long, so they don't have that same evolution of their immune system over time.

Should you dial the immune system up to that slightly more aggressive, twitchy state?

Does that come with any downsides or side effects?

You need to think actually quite carefully how you might want to use one of these vaccines.

So there are lots of questions that still need answering.

The team think that maybe, say, at the start of COVID when we didn't have any vaccines, perfect scenario to use something like this.

Or maybe just at the very beginning of winter, you have a little spray up the nose and that would see you through the couple of months of winter.

Because obviously, when it comes to vaccinations, people, there are groups within society that are concerned about it just in terms of this kind of rollout.

It's not going to be anytime soon, is it?

The work has been done to even think about offering it to people outside of clinical trials and testing it in the laboratory still.

And then I think it will be a really interesting conversation, actually

because it's a very different style of vaccine to the ones that we're used to.

This is against quite a broad range of different infections instead of just against one.

The immunity seems to last maybe a couple of months in the animal studies, rather than the kind of like you get lifelong immunity from measles vaccine.

And I think should the scientists ever get to that point where they have something that people could.

So it's a little bit fluid at the moment.

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Single vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flus, researchers say | BBC News

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