In the mid-1980s, Jonathan Heeney was a doctoral student at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Maryland when he was told to fly across the country to Oregon to investigate a mysterious disease news that it was causing a wave of sudden deaths in a group of cheetahs in captivity.
For Heeney, it turned out to be his first known encounter with a coronavirus. “We finally determined that it was a coronavirus that had jumped from domestic cats to these cheetahs,” he says. “And because cheetahs were a new host, it caused a lot of death and destruction. So that was my introduction to them.”
Four decades later and Heeney is at the helm of DIOSynVax, a Cambridge, UK-based biotech company that recently received a $42m (£34m/€41m) grant from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), the foundation supported by Bill and Melinda Gates, the Indian and Norwegian governments and the World Economic Forum, among others.
Heeney and his colleagues face a challenge that has long proven insurmountable for scientists: developing vaccines that can protect against not just a single coronavirus, but multiple strains, varieties and perhaps even entire families . A comparable feat has never been achieved in the history of virology, after more than two decades of pursuing the same goal in the flu it gave nothing of note. Some have even compared the ambition, scope and difficulty of the task to the famous Manhattan Project of the 1940s, which pushed the boundaries of physics at the time and produced the world’s first atomic bomb.
Money is being thrown at the target in unprecedented sums. CEPI has been allocated an initial budget of around $200 million (£169 million/€193 million), with the NIH adding an additional $36 million (£30 million/€35 million euros) in the jar. Buoyed by its success in developing one of the first vaccines against Covid-19, Moderna has recently entered the fray, announcing its intention to produce a vaccine that can protect against the four coronaviruses that cause the common cold.
Heeney knows the road ahead better than anyone, having spent the last few years trying to develop a single vaccine that can protect against different viral hemorrhagic fevers: Ebola, Marburg virus and Lassa fever.
“We’re taking a similar approach,” he says. “It’s about looking at the structural biology, the genetic relationships, what changes in these viruses and what doesn’t.”