By Elie Dolgin

Each year, vaccine companies gamble on the flu strain they expect to make the most people sick in the coming season and develop a new influenza vaccine to protect against it. The strategy involves a risky calculus, so researchers have turned to targeting nonmutating components of the virus with an eye to forging a universal flu vaccine capable of providing lasting protection from a single shot.

“The hope is that if we make and develop a vaccine based on these conserved [regions], then the vaccine would last

longer than just one year,” says Peter Palese, a virologist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

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