A vaccine usually trains your immune system to recognize one target. Here, the target is basically “anything that doesn’t belong in the lungs.” That is the surprising promise behind a new mouse study from Stanford Medicine researchers and collaborators. The team reports an intranasal vaccine formula that protected mice for months against several respiratory viruses, two bacteria that often cause hospital infections, and even an allergen linked to asthma. The findings are published in Science. “I think what we have is a universal vaccine against diverse respiratory threats,” said Bali Pulendran, PhD, the Violetta L. Horton Professor II and a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford. Haibo Zhang, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in Pulendran’s lab, is the study’s lead author. Bali Pulendran, Violetta L. Horton Professor, Director, Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection and Professor of Microbiology and Immunology. (CREDIT: Jim Gensheimer) A different bet than “match the antigen” For more than two centuries, vaccine design has leaned on one big idea: antigen specificity. You show the body a harmless version of a pathogen’s …