Journal of Infection, external<\/a> said the impact on the immune system was “modest”, but they are still generating excitement. <\/p>\nProf Saul Faust, who performed some of the trials at the University of Southampton, said the AI design “definitely has potential” and was “really exciting”.<\/p>\n
He told the BBC: “What’s really interesting is the technology is an awful lot better at designing vaccines for potential pandemics when viruses are changing.”<\/p>\n
The Cambridge team are already performing animal research on universal seasonal flu vaccines that would not need to be adapted every year and an H5N1-bird flu vaccine, in case the virus that is currently devastating bird populations became a human pandemic.<\/p>\n
They are also looking at a vaccine for viral haemorrhagic fevers, which would include Ebola species. The current outbreak in the Democratic Republic Congo is being caused by a species that does not have a vaccine developed for it yet.<\/p>\n
Prof Andy Pollard, the director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, was not involved in the study, but said this approach was generating compelling evidence in animal research.<\/p>\n
“It’s fascinating data and people wouldn’t have predicted they’d be able to generate these immune responses,” he told BBC News.<\/p>\n
The real test, he says, is what happens in the human trials as our immune systems are different to laboratory mice as ours have been shaped by years of infections.<\/p>\n
More broadly he said artificial intelligence was going to be a “game changer” for vaccine research and that AI tools had the potential to predict how the immune system respond would respond to a vaccine making development much faster and would “save lives”.<\/p>\n
Prof Marian Knight, scientific director for National Institute for Health and Care Research, said: “The remarkable success of this AI-designed ‘super-antigen’ trial marks a pivotal leap forward in our ability to deliver broad, lasting viral protection.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The trials, in 39 people, were designed to assess if such vaccines were safe. A second study \u2013…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":621722,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-621721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=621721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621721\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/621722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=621721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=621721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=621721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}