Meet someone who is absolutely certain he knows what the next epidemic or pandemic will be. His name is Eric Weaver, Ph.D., and he is a UNL biology professor who does research at NCV.
“I know what’s next,” Weaver said. “It’s influenza. There hasn’t been a year on record where we don’t have it. There are hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide. On average, 30,000 people in the United States die from influenza on a normal year. That’s just something that we have for some reason found OK.”
Weaver has decided that it’s not OK, and he has devoted his career to battling viruses. His current research is based on one key idea: Delve back into the flu’s genetic past to avoid the matching game. Every year, epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization pick a strain of the flu to inoculate people with, hoping that they correctly guess which strain is going to be particularly virulent that year. Sometimes they guess wrong, like they did last year. Flu shots help, but Weaver puts their effectiveness at about 74%.
Everyone knows that part of the problem is that the flu mutates constantly. Weaver’s research aims to address that.
“The idea is to design a vaccine through an analysis of the genetic code of influenza,” Weaver said. “We analyze and string together short stretches of the flu virus proteins, termed epitopes. By selecting and stringing together the most common epitopes, we are likely recreating ancestral forms of the flu, and these ancestral sequences can be used to create broadly protective vaccines. So far, our studies indicate that these vaccines do, indeed, induce protection against a wide array of divergent flu viruses.”
The goal: a vaccine that protects against multiple, if not all, strains of the flu and lasts a lifetime. Initial tests in mice and swine show that the idea works, and Weaver and his team are now waiting for funding to take the testing to the next level.
Diseases don’t always receive funding proportional to the number of people they impact, Weaver noted. Every year, a flu epidemic or pandemic has a significant impact in terms of lost working hours and burden on the health care system, in addition to thousands of deaths, primarily among the older population.
“When you’re talking about someone who’s elderly dying from the flu, they shouldn’t be dismissed,” Weaver said. “Why is a day in the life of someone who’s older less valuable than any other day for any other person?”
While he had hoped never to see a pandemic like COVID-19, Weaver knows what he wants people to learn from this experience.
“The main message that I want people to take away from this pandemic is: Let’s not forget,” said Weaver. “Let’s not brush this aside once we get through it. Future pandemics are inevitable, so it’s important to fund the science and do really comprehensive research now, so that in a future pandemic, we have a head start.”
