Influenza virus antigenicity and broadly neutralizing epitopes

A vaccine formulation that would be effective against all strains of influenza virus has long been a goal of vaccine developers, but antibodies after infection or vaccination were seen to be strain specific and there was little evidence of cross-reactive antibodies that neutralized across subtypes. Recently a number of broadly neutralizing monoclonal antibodies have been characterized. This review describes the different classes of broadly neutralizing antibodies and discusses the potential of their therapeutic use or for design of immunogens that induce a high proportion of broadly neutralizing antibodies.