How would you like to help researchers better understand how flu vaccines work while making some money at the same time? The University of Rochester Medical Center is looking for 38 people between ages 18 and 42 to participate in two different flu vaccine studies.

Volunteers must be in good health, not pregnant, and not allergic to eggs. Both studies involve a nose squirt vaccine, then monitoring of health and levels of blood proteins.

Participants in one study will be required to stay at Unity's St. Mary's Campus for 12 days, participants in the other study will need to return to URMC for testing 12 different times.

The studies pay $650 and $1,700.

Christine Hay, Infectiouse Disease Specialist, said, "We're hoping to have a stockpile of vaccines we can bring out and use right away in case of a pandemic. But unfortunately some of the ones we've developed don't seem to work very well in humans and we don't really know why that is. So the purpose of the two studies we're doing is to try to figure out why some vaccines work better that others".

Hay says the vaccines are against two bird flu viruses shown to affect humans.

If you're interesting in participating, call the URMC Vaccine Research Unit at 585-273-3990.