Flu Forecast

Any type of influenza, such as bird or swine flu, jumping from animals to humans is cause for concern. New strains present a threat because our bodies have no immunity developed from past exposure, so being able to predict which forms of flu might take hold in humans would be useful. Now researchers might have a way to tell whether a particular flu could cause us harm. They grew an artificial replica of human airways from human stem cells, which can be exposed to any potentially threatening strain to see if infection sets in. The structures are made of live, functioning cells like the one shown, with tiny hairs beating just as they would in your airways. Initial tests accurately identified which strains of bird and swine flu could infect humans, and armed with this warning system we might be better prepared to fight the next flu epidemic.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Video from work by Jie Zhou and colleagues
• State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong and Hubrecht Institute, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Utrecht, The Netherlands
• Video copyright held by original authors; reproduction permitted by PNAS
• Published in PNAS, June 2018