A Vaccine for all Occasions

Scientists are developing a “universal vaccine” that would protect against anything the coronavirus can throw at us and maybe even the common cold.

- By Adam Piore

It took Barney Graham, Jason Mclellan and their collaborators just a weekend in January 2020 to design a novel vaccine they believed would be capable of protecting people against COVID-19. Their design formed the basis for the vaccines that Moderna, Pfizer and others would eventually use to inoculate millions of Americans a little more than a year later, a pace of development unprecedented in the annals of modern medicine.

By then, however, the two pioneering virologists were already thinking about future pandemics— and how they might get ahead of them.

Graham and McLellan are part of a corps of researchers hoping to take the technology they used on COVID-19 vaccines and apply them to an even more futuristic creation: an arsenal of off-the-shelf premade vaccines that could be easily modified to attack new pathogens as they arise—a kind of “pan” or “universal” coronavirus vaccine capable of protecting against many different strains of the virus at the same time.

Even as scientists race to develop booster shots and tweak existing vaccines to work against new variants to SARS2, they’re looking ahead to future pandemics caused by entirely new pathogens from the same coronavirus family, one of just 26 known to infect humans. But SARS-CoV-2 is the third novel, deadly coronavirus to cross over from animals to humans in the last 20 years, and many scientists warn more will inevitably follow. Even though a “universal” vaccine that can protect against any new coronavirus that nature throws at us probably won’t be available this year or next, development has become a high priority.