A ‘Universal Vaccine’ May Soon Protect Against All Coronaviruses, Including the Common Cold

A ‘Universal Vaccine’ May Soon Protect Against All Coronaviruses, Including the Common Cold

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.