University of Minnesota
https://twin-cities.umn.edu/
612-625-5000
Milestone
4.1.c

New antigen design

In progress
High priority

Continue research on new antigen design to enable the development of broadly protective or universal influenza vaccines.

Progress Highlights

NIAID is evaluating a computationally designed mosaic nanoparticle composed of full-length HA trimers from 6 different influenza A and B strains in phase 1 trials NCT06863142 and NCT05968989.
 

Houser 2022 conducted a phase 1 trial (NCT03186781) to evaluate a novel H2HA-ferritin nanoparticle vaccine candidate, composed of 8 antigenically intact influenza H2 HA trimers arrayed on the nanoparticle surface. 

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NIAID developed and evaluated two stabilized (headless) HA stem-only nanoparticle vaccine candidates (Andrews 2023, Widge 2023).

Osivax (France) is developing the OVX836 nanoparticle based on the nucleoprotein (NP) antigen from influenza A and B strains.

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Oftung 2022 incorporated conserved regions of the M1, M2, NP-A, and NP-B influenza virus proteins in a peptide-based influenza vaccine candidate.

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Recombinant HA antigens using computationally optimized broadly reactive antigens (COBRA) are under development with various vaccine platform technologies, including whole inactivated virus or split inactivated virus formulations (Shi 2025), mRNA-lipid nanoparticles (Allen 2024; Hendy 2024), recombinant NA (Uno 2024), recombinant HA (Allen 2024), virus-like particles (Zhang 2024), and recombinant adenovirus-associated virus vectors (Wiggins 2024).
 

Arevalo 2022 developed a multivalent mRNA-lipid nanoparticle vaccine candidate encoding HA antigens from all 20 known influenza A and B virus subtypes.   

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