Development of Vaccines Against COVID-19

The numbers of SARS-CoV-2 infection and death due to COVID-19 are climbing at an alarming rate in the U.S. and globally. While social distancing will likely help tamp down the spread of the infection, the only sure way to protect the general public is through vaccination. A team from the College of Veterinary Medicine will use a recently patented technology that is based on a new viral vector called Pichinde virus (PICV) to develop a possible vaccine for COVID-19. "We have successfully demonstrated that the technological platform can be used to develop a new vaccine against human influenza virus that shows 100% protection against lethal influenza infection in a mouse model," explains Hinh Ly, PhD, associate professor of veterinary and biomedical sciences. "Here, we propose to engineer new PICV-based vaccines that express the SARS-CoV-2's surface protein (spike protein S) and/or nucleocapsid protein (N), which are known to induce strong humoral (antibody) and adaptive (T-cell) responses, and to determine whether and how well the new vaccines can generate these specific cellular immune responses in vaccinated mice."