Joining forces at ETH Zurich for a covid-19 vaccine

Friday the 13th of March, we received the first foreboding email "Update on the coronavirus" from the ETH President, Joël Mesot. Monday's whispers in the halls about a shutdown were soon reality and by Thursday I was standing nearly alone in the lab making final checks of instruments and samples and feeling heartbroken at the sight of the empty lab and the halted experiments. Later that day I joined Emma Slack for one of those first online meetings. Emma discussed her plans and a healthy list of potential collaborators for developing a covid-​19 vaccine. We had an ongoing collaboration making anti-​bacterial vaccines, why not repurpose our platform to address the pandemic?

This required a complete change in tack. We normally make vaccines targeting the unusual sugar polymers that form the outer surface of bacterial pathogens. To achieve this, pathogen-​associated polysaccharides are grafted onto the surface of highly immunogenic nanoparticles, formed from the capsid protein of a bacteriophage. But there were no unusual sugars on the surface of SARS-​CoV-2. This virus, assembled by our own cells, is heavily decorated with human sugars - an effective strategy to evade the immune response. Nevertheless, the virus does have some vulnerable surface structures that are targeted by neutralizing antibodies. Further, some internal components of the virus are highly conserved across betacoronaviruses (including MERS and SARS-​CoV) and these structures might be used to prime a cellular immune response that would recognize and kill infected cells at early stages in the infection. If we could graft these B and T cell peptides into an immunogenic nanoparticle, we would have a vaccine candidate that could impact the pandemic, as well as providing a scaffold that could be rapidly adapted for future betacoronavirus species jumps.
One of the most striking aspects of the past 6 weeks is the remarkable goodwill and readiness of so many people to contribute their time and resources to the project. Professors providing resources and expertise. A pioneer fellow who volunteered his best technician. Whole institutes donating computing power. Companies providing valuable intellectual property. Most importantly, scientists returning to the lab during the shutdown to push the project forward. Thanks to these many generous efforts, testing of the first candidate vaccines is already underway.

Globally, there are more than 100 covid-​19 vaccines in the pipeline. It is only a matter of time until this enormous effort begins bearing fruit. Our vaccine will not be the fastest through the development pipeline, but it will have one important advantage. In contrast to many of the first wave of vaccines that require sophisticated and expensive biotechnological production facilities, this vaccine is designed to be cheap and easy to produce, to be manufactured directly in low-​ and middle-​income countries. This vaccine has the potential to reach into corners of the world that need it most.