By: Hollie Hojek
hhojek@kcautv.com
There's amazing research going on right now at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion.
"You can see in the wells, where the virus is present."
Right now, a team of biomedical students are trying to predict what next season's flu virus might look like. They're doing that by monitoring hundreds of thousands of old flu strains from years past.
"And influenza changes so rapidly, it's not always accurate," said Victor Huber, Ph.D., assistant biomedical professor at University of South Dakota in Vermillion.
Huber and his teams are just one of the many labs across the country doing this type of research.
Why? To help create an even more accurate form of the flu vaccine for next season. So how exactly do they do it? It starts with store-bought eggs.
Dr. Huber injects them with a strain of a flu virus... Then after three days ...he monitors how much the virus has grown. After that he knows the viruses characteristics so he can make a vaccine against it.
Now as far as discovering a universal flu vaccines goes, Dr. Huber says that's probably another ten years in the making.
