An international team of scientists have designed a new generation of universal flu vaccines to protect against future global pandemics that could kill millions.

The vaccine could give protection for up to 88% of known flu strains worldwide in a single shot, spelling the end of the winter flu season.

The collaboration involving the universities of Lancaster, Aston and Complutense in Madrid have applied ground-breaking computational techniques to design the vaccine in a study published in the  journal Bioinformatics.