With flu season is approaching, a new, more effective vaccine has just been approved for anyone age 50 and older in the U.S. thanks to the Cambridge drug company Moderna.
On Thursday, the Food and Drug Administration approved Moderna’s mFLUSIVA vaccine for people who are 50 years old and above.
It was a reversal for the federal agency from earlier this year when the FDA wouldn’t even review Moderna’s application. The agency reversed course after a public outcry.
The move is groundbreaking because it’s the first approval of a flu vaccine based on mRNA technology, which was only used previously for COVID-19 inoculations.
Last year, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. canceled nearly $500 million in grants and contracts for developing mRNA technology.
But the method promises to deliver better protection faster, and the vaccine aims to be able to target widespread or virulent strains of the flu.
Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett-Helaire, an infectious disease specialist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said it essentially trains your immune system better.
“Think of it like a picture,” she said. “If I saw a picture of your face, it could be blurry or it could be high definition. So, typically mRNA presents proteins to the body in a very high-definition way, so the immune system is very clear on what it’s going to protect.”
Late-stage trial results conducted by Moderna and reviewed by the FDA show that the new vaccine is about 27% more effective at preventing serious infection than anything else that’s currently available.
Moderna did a head-to-head comparison of its vaccine against the current one in 304 adults aged 50 or older, and the results showed greater effectiveness against most strains of the flu to which the trial participants were exposed.
It is currently authorized for people between the ages of 50 and 64. Previously, it got accelerated approval for adults 65 and older.
“It really lets us know that vaccines that we’ve been taking for years and years and years, like the flu vaccine — there are potentially new and revolutionary ways that we can improve upon those vaccines,” Corbett-Helaire said.
In an email to GBH, Moderna said that it doesn’t know yet whether the approval will lead to more hiring in Massachusetts. In addition to it’s Cambridge headquarters, the company is already among the largest biotech employers in the state, with more than 4,400 of its employees based in Massachusetts as of last year, according to data from MassBio.
The company is yet to announce a price for the vaccine, but the shots are expected to hit retail locations within weeks.
The flu kills more than 300,000 people around the world each year, with about 45,000 deaths in the US alone during the last flu season, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“With the older, more traditional technology, it could take a while between being able to make the decision as to what strains are going to be included in the vaccine and getting it to the people,” said Dr. Sabrina Assoumou, an infectious disease physician at Boston Medical Center and associate professor at Boston University.
“And so, having this mRNA technology is going to allow us to move at a quicker pace, which is going to be very helpful and hopefully have a more accurate vaccine that’s going to be more protective for flu season.”
