3 min readHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
- Though vaccine hesitancy remains persistent, scientists are working to create new immunizations to protect people from current and future threats.
- A new study highlights significant steps toward a universal vaccine that can treat a variety of respiratory illnesses—including viruses, bacteria, and allergens—by using the body’s adaptive immune system to coax the innate immune system to operate longer.
- So far, the new vaccine has only proven effective in mice, but scientists hope to begin human trials soon, with the aim of making it available to the public in five to seven years.
While vaccines have taken a bit of a PR hit lately thanks to rampant misinformation, scientists have diligently continued to improve them in search of what many consider to be the “holy grail” of immunizations: a universal vaccine. Would such a vaccine protect someone from every microbial threat imaginable? Well, probably not. But its broad-spectrum application—tackling a number of viruses, bacteria, and allergens—could limit the number of jabs people undergo every year, and vastly improve public health.
In a study published in November of 2025, scientists at Stanford University reported that a new vaccine gave mice significant protection against coronaviruses such as SARS-CoV-2, Staphylococcus aureus (staph), Acinetobacter baumannii, and even common house dust mites, putting it far above the norm in terms of versatility. Typically, vaccines operate under what’s called antigen specificity. When someone takes the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, for example, the vaccine mimics some component of the virus to prepare the body to fight off future infections. That works wonderfully until the pathogen mutates. Because antigen-specific vaccines have to match their pathogen to work, if the pathogen changes, the vaccine must change with it to remain effective. That’s why vaccines for diseases like COVID-19 and the flu need to be updated so regularly.
“That’s been the paradigm of vaccinology for the last 230 years,” Stanford’s Bali Pulendran, lead author of the study, said in a press statement. “It’s becoming increasingly clear that many pathogens are able to quickly mutate. Like the proverbial leopard that changes its spots, a virus can change the antigens on its surface.”
Pulendran and his team decided to take a different approach. Instead of playing antigen whack-a-mole, they looked specifically at how the body’s immune cells communicate with one another during an infection. The body actually has two lines of immune defense—the innate immune system and the adaptive immune system. The innate system is essentially the rapid response team that, by its very nature, protects the body from foreign invasion. It includes things like skin, mucus, tears, and certain immune cells (dendritic cells, neutrophils, and macrophages).
The problem is that these tools are non-specific, and usually keep functioning for just a few days. That’s where adaptive immunity comes in. While it’s inherently slower to respond, the adaptive immune system can tailor defenses against a specific attacker.
In a 2023 study published in the journal Nature Immunology, Pulendran and his team discovered that the Bacille Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccination, a tuberculosis vaccine, could induce both the innate and adaptive immune responses. But instead of the innate responses shutting down after a few days, they persisted for months because T cells from the adaptive response were recruiting innate cells in the lungs to remain active.
“Those T cells were providing a critical signal to keep the activation of the innate system, which typically lasts for a few days or a week, but in this case, it could last for three months,” Pulendran said in a press statement. “Imagine getting a nasal spray in the fall months that protects you from all respiratory viruses including COVID-19, influenza, respiratory syncytial virus and the common cold, as well as bacterial pneumonia and early spring allergens.”
That’s the ultimate goal of the researchers’ new vaccine, GLA-3M-052-LS+OVA. Pulendran describes the vaccine as a “double whammy” against infection, as the prolonged innate response (at least, when tested in mice) decreased the amount of virus in the lungs by 700-fold. The vaccine also suppressed an immune response known as the Th2, which is linked to allergic asthma, so airways were also cleared of mucus when mice were exposed to dust.
The next step is phase one trials in humans. The hope is that the universal vaccine will be available within the next five to seven years, providing an effective treatment for new respiratory viruses and simplifying everyone’s not-so-enjoyable yearly immunization ritual.
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Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.