A speedy new way to make antibodies to flu could provide a treatment within weeks of the onset of a pandemic.
At present flu vaccines take at least six months to produce after a new strain appears. A faster life-saving strategy might be to treat people with antibodies produced by earlier patients. The main antibody-secreting cells take up to four weeks to appear, but there is a transient burst of another kind of antibody-making cell a week after infection.
Now a team at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, has isolated these early cells from people injected with an ordinary flu…
