Advancing influenza antigenic analysis to improve vaccine effectiveness

我的项目旨在帮助流感疫苗更有效。流感是一种常见疾病，人们在生活中多次感染。流感可能导致严重的疾病或死亡，特别是对儿童、老年人和有长期健康问题的人。建议这些群体中的人接种流感疫苗以避免生病。疫苗的工作原理是教会身体识别和战胜感染。问题是：流感病毒有许多不同的变种，每一种都需要不同的疫苗。每年都有不同的品种传播，困难的是预测用哪种流感病毒来制造疫苗。目前，科学家和医生不断从世界各地收集和测试流感病毒样本。这会告诉他们哪些流感类型可能正在传播，以帮助决定在疫苗中加入什么。有时，在选择疫苗后，病毒类型会发生变化，这会使疫苗的效果变得不那么好。一种数学方法已经开发出来，它以图片的形式显示不同的流感病毒是如何相关的，这种地图显示了不同的病毒有多相似。彼此相似的病毒会在地图上出现得很近，而更不同的病毒在地图上会更远。通过观察病毒在这张地图上的下一步可能移动到哪里，我们可以看到我们的疫苗针对哪些类型。在过去的十年中，有五个事件意味着我需要更新这个数学方法。一些流感病毒的变化意味着必须使用不太可靠的实验测量方法。目前的方法是为了更可靠的测量而设计的。现在有大量的数据，如果能把它们放在一起分析，它们会更有用。如果将所有信息联系起来，我们将更多地了解流感是如何变化的。流感病毒的变化模式有了新的差异，我想进一步调查。近年来，流感病毒发生了更多但更小的变化，旧的流感病毒没有那么快地被取代。使用动物实验的传统方法不再提供有用的结果。相反，需要使用人的血液样本。人们过去接种过流感和流感疫苗，所以他们的血液样本更难理解。我们现在可以在实验室里对病毒进行改变，以帮助我们了解病毒在自然界中是如何变化的。我们现在需要了解自然流感病毒类型与这些实验室改变的病毒类型之间的关系。为了改进这个数学方法，我将生成练习数据，在那里我知道结果会是什么。我用练习数据制作了这些地图，看看它们有多好。我会让练习数据接近真实数据，有缺失、不一致或不足的数据！当当前的方法不能很好地处理实践数据时，我会生成结果可能不可靠的警告。我还将寻求数学方法来改进结果。在目前的流感病毒上进行实验存在困难，科学家需要做不同类型的实验来获得必要的信息(不太可靠的实验和使用人类血液样本)。我会更新数学方法，以便能够应对这些变化。我将确保决定在即将到来的疫苗中使用哪些病毒的人对他们的数据有最好的解释。有关当前病毒的可靠、最新信息也将有助于我们了解实验室中病毒变化的影响。鉴于受流感影响的人口比例很大，流感疫苗非常重要。密集而谨慎地开发模拟流感病毒变化的新方法，将有助于选择最好的流感疫苗，使儿童和老年人在冬天过得好。

My project aims to help make the flu vaccine more effective.Flu is a common illness that people catch many times in their lives. Flu can cause severe disease or death, particularly in children, the elderly and people with long-standing health problems. It is recommended that people in these groups get the flu vaccine to avoid getting ill.Vaccines work by teaching the body to recognise and defeat an infection. Here's the problem: there are many different varieties of flu virus and a different vaccine is needed against each one. Different varieties spread each year, and the difficulty is predicting which flu virus to make the vaccine with. Currently, scientists and doctors constantly gather and test flu virus samples from around the world. This tells them which flu types might be spreading to help decide what to put in the vaccine. Sometimes the virus type can change after the vaccine choice, and this makes the vaccine work less well.A mathematical method has been developed that shows how different flu viruses are related as a picture, a kind of map that shows how similar different viruses are. Viruses that are like each other will appear close together in the map and viruses that are more different will be further apart on the map. By seeing where the virus may move to next on this map, we can see which types to target with our vaccines.There are five events in the past decade that mean I need to update this mathematical method.1. Changes in some flu viruses mean that a less reliable experimental measurement must be used. The current method was designed for more reliable measurements.2. There is now a large amount of data that would be more useful if it could be analysed all together. We would understand a lot more about how flu changes if all the information was linked up.3. There are new differences in the pattern of changes of flu viruses that I want to investigate further. In recent years, there have been more but smaller changes in flu viruses, and old flu viruses are not being replaced so quickly.4. Traditional methods using animal experiments no longer give helpful results. Instead, blood samples from people need to be used. People have had flu and flu vaccines in the past so their blood samples are more complicated to understand.5. We can now make changes to viruses in the laboratory to help us understand how viruses change in nature. We now need to understand how natural flu virus types relate to these laboratory changed virus types. To improve this mathematical method, I will generate practice data, where I know what the outcome would be. I make these maps using the practice data and see how good they are. I will make the practice data similar to real data, with missing, inconsistent or insufficient data! When the current method does not work well with the practice data, I will generate warnings that the results may not be reliable. I will also seek mathematical ways to improve the results.There are difficulties with experimenting on current flu viruses and scientists need to do different types of experiments to get the necessary information (less reliable experiments and using human blood samples). I will update the mathematical method to be able to cope with these changes. I will make sure that the people who decide which viruses to use in the upcoming vaccines have the best interpretation of their data. Reliable, up-to-date information on current viruses will also help us to understand the effects of changing viruses in the laboratory.In view of the large percentage of the population affected by flu, the flu vaccine is very important. Intensive and careful development of new ways of modelling flu virus changes will help choose the best flu vaccine to keep children and the elderly well in winter.