As most of us were blithely welcoming the new year of 2020, word was just starting to get out in medical and scientific circles. A virus that had never been seen before in humans was making an alarming number of people in Wuhan, China, desperately ill with pneumonia.
Soon the worst was confirmed: the new virus was exceptionally virulent and contagious, spreading quickly within China, then to other countries. Nowhere was safe.
Within weeks, the genome of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID‑19, had been sequenced and shared online, launching an unprecedented worldwide co-operative effort among scientists, public health officials and health-care workers, all focused on stopping the virus’s deadly progress.
At the U of A’s Li Ka Shing Institute of Virology, researchers were paying attention. They had been preparing for this moment.
Ready to pivot
The Li Ka Shing Institute was formed in 2010, bringing together top researchers to tackle the world’s deadliest scourges: infectious diseases like hepatitis, human immunodeficiency virus, Ebola and coronaviruses. They knew the next one could be the big one — a pandemic that would bring the world to a halt.
But they had never seen anything quite so vicious as COVID‑19.
When virologist Michael Houghton first heard about COVID‑19, he thought it might be like the SARS epidemic of 2003. “You know, SARS was a major problem but it went away quite quickly,” he says. “Of course, I and everyone else soon realized this is much worse than SARS.” [UPDATE: In October 2020, Houghton was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. .]
Which is why, once the genome was public, Houghton and many others at the Li Ka Shing Institute jumped straight to work brainstorming new ideas and re-examining old ones, pivoting to focus their expertise and laboratories on the novel coronavirus. Over the course of a weekend, federal officials reviewed research proposals — record time in the world of scientific funding — and in early March, five U of A projects received federal dollars and the green light. Before the end of the month, through the rapid response COVID-19 fund in a partnership between the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ Innovates — the highest number of funded projects at a Canadian institution. Philanthropists saw the need, too: soon after the pandemic began, one anonymous donor stepped forward with a $100,000 investment in promising COVID‑19 research across the university.
Across faculties and disciplines, researchers and others have responded, ready to apply their expertise in any way they can.
Among them are some of the world’s foremost experts, who are hunting for three important weapons against COVID‑19: tests, treatment and, of course, the Holy Grail — a targeted vaccine.
Quest for a vaccine
Here is the traditional approach to making a vaccine. First, grow the virus in a cell culture. Next, purify it, then chemically inactivate it and, finally, inoculate people. Those people will now produce antibodies that, when exposed to the active virus, help shut down any potential infection and prevent disease. The downside? This approach requires a very large biohazard manufacturing facility, which we don’t have in Canada.
Another common method involves weakening the virus before inoculation. This is the type of vaccine given routinely to Canadian children to prevent diseases such as measles, mumps and chicken pox. But it can take a long time to develop a safe version — a big risk when there is no approved treatment for COVID‑19.
And time is something we don’t have.
That’s why many of the COVID‑19 vaccine projects underway around the world are taking new tacks to produce effective antibodies. Some will isolate and inject a nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) from the virus in order to trick the body into mounting an immune response even though the whole virus isn’t present. Others will use a harmless, defective “vector virus” that acts as a delivery vehicle for the surface spike protein of the coronavirus — again tricking the body into creating antibodies against just part of the virus.
Houghton is taking his own approach, which his many years of experience tell him is the best way to produce viral antibodies. And he knows a thing or two about infectious diseases. He is the co‑discoverer of the hepatitis C virus. In collaboration with Lorne Tyrrell, ’64 BSc, ’68 MD, founding director of the Li Ka Shing Institute, Houghton developed a hepatitis C vaccine that is headed for clinical trials next year.
