New technologies for influenza vaccines

Influenza vaccine preparations have been administered to humans since the late 1930s, and the diversity of approaches in licensed trivalent seasonal or monovalent pandemic products is unparalleled by vaccines against any other target. These approaches include inactivated whole virus vaccines, detergent or solvent "split" vaccines, subunit vaccines, live attenuated vaccines, adjuvanted vaccines, intramuscular vaccines, intradermal vaccines, intranasal vaccines, egg-produced vaccines and mammalian cell culture-produced vaccines. The challenges of influenza immunization, including multiple co-circulating strains, antigenic change over time, a broad age spectrum of disease, and the threat of pandemics, continue to drive the development of new approaches. This review describes some of the new approaches to influenza immunization that are the subjects of active research and development.