05/06/2026
🧬 The future of medicine is moving fast, and it's exactly the kind of science our students are learning to work with.
For the first time, scientists have used artificial intelligence to design the active ingredient of a vaccine and tested it in people. Instead of building a jab around one virus strain and updating it every time the virus changes, the AI was fed the genetic codes of a whole family of coronaviruses and designed a single "super-antigen" - one intended to train the immune system to recognise the entire family, including variants that don't even exist yet 🦠
The early results, published in the Journal of Infection, come from a safety trial in 39 volunteers, with a larger study of around 200 people now underway. The immune response so far is described as "modest" but promising, and the same approach is now being applied to universal flu and bird flu vaccines.
It's a brilliant example of computational biology, immunology and AI coming together in one place, and a real glimpse of where pharmaceutical science is heading 💡 That's exactly why we're building AI and digital skills into our programmes, enabling future pharmacists and scientists are ready to understand, question and shape science like this 💙
Read more here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crrpggegwe0o
..and learn more about what we do at www.qub.ac.uk/pha
