Has an Israeli Company Come Up with a Cure for Swine Flu – and All Other Flus, Too?

After the “egg on face” aftermath of the media’s reporting on the LifePatch affair, you’d think the media would be a little more demure in its descriptions of paradigm-changing Israeli hi-tech and medical innovations. (I admit I was taken in by the LifePatch story too, but the company’s website is still up and nobody has been arrested or charged with any fraud crimes. So it may have been a case of premature excitement, instead of outright fraud. Time will tell).

Anyway, this past week saw the reporting of a new, major Israeli invention. According to a report on Israel Radio (Reshet Bet, the news feature station), a Rehovot company called BiondVax developed a “universal vaccine” for all forms of flu – Bird (Avian), H1N1 (swine), Hong Kong, Bolivian, and any creature, city, or country in between. You take the vaccine once, and you’re forever protected against any all flus that may strike, locally or pandemically.

The report, on Sunday morning, came after President Obama’s declaration of a state of swine flu emergency in the U.S., so it’s possible the reporter who submitted the story got a little over-excited – and that, coupled with his misunderstanding of what the vaccine actually does, led to what was clearly an overstatement (it’s nice to see, though, such a high level of Israeli pride from the likes of a Reshet Bet reporter, on a station where the reporters often try to outdo each other with their denigration of thos country).

BiondVax’s shares on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange jumped Sunday morning, but perhaps with memories of LifePatch still fresh in the minds of the company’s directors, a BiondVax spokesperson got on the radio to play down the story. The original report said, for example, that the BiondVax vaccine had been determined to be safe for pregnant women for swine flu inoculations (Pregnant women are more susceptible to swine flu as a group, but securing vaccines for them has been more difficult because of fears of the effects on them of MF59 Adjuvant, included in many doses. So, a vaccine that could be administered to pregnant women without MF59 Adjuvant, as the Israel Radio report said the BiondVax vaccine could, would have been big news in itself). But the BiondVax spokesperson said that the company hadn’t tested pregnant women at all, and played down the possibility that it could function as a swine flu vaccine.

But if LifePatch was guilty of overstating its innovation, it appears that BiondVax’s minimizing the report seems over-conservative, which you look at the research the company has done. It really is developing a virus super-vaccine that would be administered only once every three to five years, that would cover all the flu viruses floating around. Flu viruses, it turns out, have common characteristics called “conserved epitopes,” which can be treated using a single method (which BiondVax has discovered and patented). More tests are to be conducted over the coming year, but already the company says that its vaccine has proven safe for younger patients (18-44). Much of the testing was done in conjunction with the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, surely an institution whose research can be trusted.

While the web site does not mention swine flu (or H1N1, the new official name for the flu – and they laughed at Yaakov Litzman when he asked that the term ’swine’ not be used!), it does say that the vaccine is/will be effective against “most human influenza virus strains, as well as the Avian flu” – avian being “bird.” It further states that it can handle the “antigenic drifts and shifts” of historical stains of flu – “such as occurred in 1918, 1957, 1968, 1976, 1977 and 1997 (Spanish, Asian, Hong Kong, Swine, Russian and Avian Flu, respectively).” The verdict is still out on LifePatch (although I doubt they would be able to get a fair hearing again, after their disappointing first-round performance) – but BiondVax’s innovation looks like the real thing!