It’s still possible to come down with the flu even if you get a flu vaccine in the fall. However, the drugs to treat you once you get sick are becoming less effective against the viruses, which vary from year to year.
UA pharmacy professor Jun Wang is developing new drugs to treat more than one flu strain by targeting a protein that is found in 95 percent of Influenza A cases.
"We would like to have one drug which can work against multiple strains of flu viruses so it doesn’t matter if the flu virus is this flu season or the next flu season. We would like to have a drug which works against all of them," Wang said.
Wang said ideally there should be a three- to four-drug combination to treat flu viruses. The UA treatment is still three to five years away from human testing.