An HIV lab’s pivot to develop a single-dose Covid-19 vaccine wins STAT Madness ‘Editors’ Pick’
On Jan. 10 last year, Dan Barouch and members of his vaccine research lab were gathered at Boston’s Museum of Science for their annual retreat. The scientists’ ears had pricked up at early word from Wuhan, China, of a strange new virus spreading. That chilled Barouch and his colleagues, who sensed danger in a stealthy pathogen finding a foothold in a world that had never seen the virus before.
That same Friday night, Chinese scientists released the genome they sequenced of the virus, not yet named SARS-CoV-2. Barouch and others left the retreat and went back across town to their vaccine and virology lab at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. For nearly 20 years they had been tackling HIV, and more recently Zika and Ebola, inventing a platform for vaccines that used engineered adenoviruses — like ones that cause the common cold —to ferry pieces of the genetic code of a bad virus into our bodies to induce our immune systems to recognize the invader and protect against it.
