Spotlight on Vaccines: Our Revolutionary Past, Present and Future
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken touring Pitt’s Center for Vaccine Research, September 2021
Before America’s first stay-at-home orders, before school and business closings, before overwhelmed hospitals and the confirmation that the world was facing a deadly pandemic, scientists at the University of Pittsburgh Center for Vaccine Research (CVR) were already hard at work on research that could prove key to stopping the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pitt was one of the first institutions in the country to receive the virus directly from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Paul Duprex, the center’s director, and his team are specially equipped to take it on. With support from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases within the National Institutes of Health, CVR’s facilities are specifically designed to handle this kind of high-stakes work, and its staff has years of experience working in biocontainment.
The team’s research became part of a $4.9 million grant to develop and test a COVID-19 vaccine as members of a three-way partnership with Institut Pasteur in Paris and Themis Bioscience, a biotech company based in Vienna.
The team’s research became part of a $4.9 million grant to develop and test a COVID-19 vaccine as members of a three-way partnership with Institut Pasteur in Paris and Themis Bioscience, a biotech company based in Vienna.
To develop a vaccine during an active and evolving pandemic, the researchers zeroed in on the most visually notable component of the pathogen as it’s depicted in computer-generated renderings: the parts that look like little red knobs sticking out of a gray sphere.
These are spike proteins, a feature of all coronaviruses. Research has shown that they can induce immunity by prompting the generation of antibodies, which fight the virus and build a person’s resistance to future infection.
To create a vaccine using spike proteins, Duprex has applied his expertise in measles, the “most infectious human virus on earth,” he says. A safe and effective measles vaccine already exists and has been successfully adapted to tackle other viruses.
The scientists say that there will not be a one-size-fits-all solution to this coronavirus. But Duprex asks and answers: “Will that burden of disease be treated by one of the most revolutionary biomedical interventions that we have ever come up with as a society—vaccines? Yes.”
Adapted from the summer 2020 Pitt Magazine article “Emergency Response”