Highly conserved influenza T cell epitopes induce broadly protective immunity.

•Approach used here can be expanded to generate flu vaccine with universal relevance.•Identified T cell epitopes induced heterologous protection in HLA transgenic mice.•Conserved flu putative immunogenic sequences were identified via immunoinformatics.•Predicted HLA-A2 and pan-DR-restricted epitopes immunogenic in HLA-transgenic mice.•Predicted CD4 and CD8 epitopes induced effector function in human T cells.