A new technique creates all-purpose antibodies that can be activated at a moment’s notice. A contagious disease that is attacking today is the swine flu- H1N1 and that is why influenza flu pandemic preparation is very important! You can have an immunization with the flu vaccine, can have the flu shot that are good before you are showing flu symptoms, although the current trivalent influenza vaccine is unlikely to provide protection against the new 2009 H1N1 strain, they are currently being developed.

Vaccines can take weeks or months to generate the antibodies that eventually protect us. Scripps Research Institute biologist Carlos Barbas and his colleagues have proposed a shortcut. First, give a conventional vaccine—one that gives you an ongoing supply of generic antibodies. Then, whenever you’re exposed to a new threat, add designer molecules that instantly stick to those antibodies and direct them toward chosen targets. Immunization/ vaccination is a great public health success story. Today, diseases that once routinely killed or permanently disabled people, like measles, polio, and diphtheria, are now nearly unheard of in industrialized countries. Immunizations even led to the total extinction of deadly smallpox. Most of the time, immunizations aren’t working against a ticking clock. You get immunized as a baby or young child, and the antibodies you develop protect for the rest of your life. However, it takes at least a week or two or even over a period of months or years in some cases for the body to mount a full immune response to the vaccine. If you were exposed to the actual germs during this window of time, you could still develop the disease. This rarely happens with childhood immunizations, since decades of immunizations have made these disease-causing germs scarce.

There are other cases in which an instant vaccine would come in handy: against a rare pandemic like swine flu, for example, or a bioterror attack that uses a never-before-seen mutant virus. Rather than try to force the body to make antibodies much faster than usual—a very challenging, perhaps impossible task—Barbas and his colleagues decided on a different strategy. They triggered an immune response in mice that created generic antibodies with a special property using a chemical drug: a spot where they tend to bind to a sticky molecule, called a “linker.” These linker molecules can be manufactured in a lab, and outfitted with additional molecules that recognize and stick to disease-causing targets, like cancer cells. When they injected the mice with cancer-seeking linker molecules, the generic antibodies grabbed them up, and transformed instantly into anti-cancer antibodies.

If this were to work in humans, then whenever you needed protection against an immediate threat, you could get a similar injection, or even swallow a pill, that would give you temporary immunity. (After a while, the targeted antibodies would clear from your system, and your body would make new, generic antibodies that could be used against something else.) It’s a long way off, but it’s a tantalizing idea—one that could give peoples the potential to fight off any illness, without having to get thousands of vaccinations “just in case.” This is a great discovery against any diseases that might come in your/our body.