LAST YEAR’S SEASONAL flu vaccine was a bit of a dud: It reduced a person’s risk of needing to see a doctor for the flu by only 23 percent. That wasn’t anyone’s fault really. Vaccines take months to make, and flu viruses are constantly mutating, so making the shots takes some guesswork. But what if doctors had a universal flu vaccine—one that worked for multiple years across multiple strains? Two new studies take them a small closer to that goal.Today, independent teams reported in Science and Nature Medicine how they’ve tinkered with a piece of viral protein so it can teach immune systems—in this case, in mice, ferrets, and monkeys—to fight whole groups of viruses rather than just a single strain. “It’s a great first step in the road for generating a universal flu vaccine,” says Gary Nabel, who oversaw one of the studies as former head of the National Institutes of Health’s Vaccine Research Center. (Disclosure: My father works at the vaccine maker Sanofi, which has since hired both Nabel and an author on the other study. Sanofi had no role in funding these studies.)

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