Bette Korber and LANL Colleagues Work on Design for Coronavirus Vaccine

Bette Korber, a research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), is using her 30 years of research skills to switch her focus from HIV research to the design of a coronavirus vaccine.

She and her colleagues have been working overtime since February and now have multiple vaccine designs that look very promising.

Korber states that, “In the last 20 years, we’ve had three really serious epidemics due to coronavirus hopping into humans and spreading.”

LANL successfully designed a Swine Flu vaccine in the past, and now they are designing what is called a T-cell vaccine that can be use with an antibody vaccine to fight the coronavirus. They are also working on a long term vaccine that would prevent outbreaks.

One challenge they face is what if the virus changes making the vaccine ineffective. About this Korber states, “We’re trying to build an analysis pipeline that takes all of the global data for this virus and monitors it to see if there are any changes that might cause an immune failure of a vaccine, that is developed for next year or whenever we get the first vaccine out.”

These vaccine designs should be completed by this summer and then passed along to experimentalists who will make the vaccine.

See the entire KOAT news article here: LANL Researchers Developing Coronavirus Vaccine Design.