Could this nasal spray replace all your vaccines one day?
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Hey, Short Wavers, Regina Barber here. And Emily Kwong. And we're back with another episode of Tech Camp, our summer series scouting the technological frontier, tracking down the breakthroughs, experiments, and innovations that could change everything. And this episode, Em, we're talking to a scientist who's developing a universal vaccine, one vaccine to rule them all.
That would be incredible because what we have now, of course, is a lot of different vaccines to protect against specific pathogens. Yes, that's right. So in this future, there would be no annual flu and COVID and RSV shots. There would just be one shot for everything. How is that even possible?
Yeah. So Bali Palendran, an immunologist at Stanford University, started seriously thinking about this in the late 2010s when he read a paper about tuberculosis. Okay. So the paper found that people vaccinated against tuberculosis were actually protected from other infections like HPV. Whoa.
What problem is this Tech Camp episode trying to solve about vaccines?
And the TB shot could boost how effective vaccines were against diseases like the flu and yellow fever, too.
And he wondered... Why is a vaccine that's been developed to protect against TB inducing such broad immunity? that is able to fight other kinds of infections. I felt that there has to be some underlying mechanism that would explain this.
That sounds like a scientist on the hunt. Yeah. And that led him to an ancient part of our immune system, one that treats all pathogens more or less the same. And using this knowledge, he and his team started making a universal vaccine, which they now have shown can work in mice.
So this new universal vaccine that we've developed really is a radical departure from pathogen-specific vaccines.
So today on the show, the future of vaccines. Gina talks to Bali about why the key may be in our ancient immunity and why a simple nasal spray may be the answer.
And along the way, I get a little help from characters like Cinderella and the Cookie Monster to explain the immune system. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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Okay, Bali, we're talking today about your ongoing research into whether scientists can develop a universal vaccine that protects against many infections. And the key here is activating a different part of the immune system from what, you know, COVID or a flu vaccine would. What is that part of the immune system?
That part of the immune system is called the innate immune system. Think of it as the Cinderella of the immune system. The innate immune system is a neglected part of the immune system. It hasn't received much attention for years. Why? Because really not many labs were studying the innate immune system. But you know, it's the oldest immune system we have in our bodies. It's ancient. It's billions of years old. Whereas the younger antibody-based or the T-cell-based immune system is only a few hundred million years old. That's still pretty old, but not nearly as old as the innate immune system.
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