As evidenced by this year's nasty flu season in America and Europe, health officials sometimes cannot predict which viral strains will run through the populace, and therefore cannot pre-order the correct vaccine cocktail to fight the flu.  New research might make that guesswork obsolete.

A team from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) says they may have created a vaccine that manages to trigger a very strong immune response without making infected animals sick.  And it does so by triggering a strong response from disease-fighting white blood cells called T cells, which would provide longer-term protection from the flu than current inoculations.  At least it does in lab ferrets and mice.

"This is really exciting," says Kathleen Sullivan, chief of the Division of Allergy and Immunology at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (who was not involved in the research) to Scientific American.  "t has the magic of both great antibody response and inducing a strong, strong T cell response that will be a safety net - so if a virus breaks through the first line of defense, you will have T cells to make sure you don't get very sick."

As usual with these 'medical breakthrough' stories, the researchers caution that more work is needed.