大象传媒

Thirty years ago years ago, in March 1995, a fresh-faced Claudia Hammond arrived at the 大象传媒 for a job interview as a trainee science producer. She put together a comprehensive list of science and health stories, ready to pitch at the interview. In this quirky, personal journey, Claudia revisits five ideas from her Ideas List to find out what happened next. She tracks each headline-grabbing story forward through the false-starts and dead ends, the surprises and successes. And she asks what each tale teaches us about the tortuous path of scientific progress.

In this episode, Claudia reexamines a story about inhalable flu vaccines that she had found in the New Scientist edition from March 11th, 1995. Normally, vaccines are administered via injections, but, in some ways, this isn鈥檛 ideal as it does not induce immunity in the mucosal tissues in the upper airways and nose.

In the early 90s, virologist Jan Wilschut decided to explore an idea: what if we were to create vaccines that could be administered right where influenza viruses enter the human body? After some very promising experiments in mice, he and his colleagues work together with a pharmaceutical company. But translating their approach into an actual medical treatment proves too difficult. And Jan wrote off the idea entirely.

Immunologist Chris Chiu shares with Claudia that, for the last decade or so, children in the UK have received an intranasal flu vaccine. The issue is that it is the only vaccine of its kind and does not work in adults. Other attempts to create similar intranasal or inhalable vaccines have not been successful as of yet. But there is hope on the horizon. The Covid pandemic has renewed interest in the idea of stopping infections in their tracks. And with new technological developments and a better understanding of the human immune system, Chris believes that inhalable vaccines could become a reality in the future.

Jan Wilschut didn鈥檛 follow any of these new developments. And hearing about it now made him reflect on his old failed attempt to revolutionise flu vaccines. Maybe his idea was just too visionary.

Producers: Florian Bohr and Jeremy Grange