Despite our best efforts to vaccinate against influenza viruses they remain a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, resulting in 3-5 million severe infections and more than 250,000 deaths annually. Constant antigenic changes in circulating viruses means current vaccines must be updated and readministered annually. This approach is time-consuming and expensive, and despite best efforts it is often hindered by mismatches between circulating and vaccine strains. Strain mismatch can contribute to insufficient vaccine efficacy, which has ranged from just 10-60% over the last decade. Furthermore, recent sporadic zoonotic outbreaks of novel highly pathogenic viruses from avian species, to which current vaccines provide no immunity, have been observed, with fatality rates around 40%. This raises serious concerns of a global pandemic with the potential to spread rapidly and kill millions of people before a vaccine can be manufactured. Novel approaches to influenza vaccination are clearly needed in order to overcome these limitations. We have stabilized recombinant influenza haemagglutinin (rHA) in its native, pre-fusion conformation by the addition of a novel “clamp” stabilization motif to enhance subunit vaccine potency and breadth of protection. Immunisation of mice with clamp-stabilized prefusion HA elicited a potent neutralizing antibody response (~4-fold improvement over current vaccines). In the absence the clamp domain, rHA was shown to generate a non-neutralizing response upon vaccination. Most importantly, antibodies elicited upon immunisation with clamp-stabilised prefusion rHA showed an 80-fold increase in cross-reactivity to rHA derived from a divergent, highly pathogenic avian virus when compared to the current influenza vaccines. A mouse challenge experiment is currently underway to assess cross-protection mediated by clamp-stabilised vaccination. Ultimately, this approach could represent the future of influenza vaccines, providing enhanced cross-protection against seasonal influenza viruses while simultaneously providing an increased cross-reactive humoral immune response to potential zoonotic pandemic strains.