In the mid 1980s, Jonathan Heeney was a PhD student at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), Maryland, when he was told to fly to Oregon – on the opposite side of the country – to investigate a mysterious new disease which was causing a surge of sudden deaths in a group of captive cheetahs.
For Heeney, it proved to be his first known encounter with a coronavirus. “We eventually determined that this was a coronavirus which had jumped from domestic cats into 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 on and Heeney is at the helm of DIOSynVax, a biotechnology company based in Cambridge, UK, who recently received a $42m (£34m/€41m) grant from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), the foundation backed by Bill and Melinda Gates, the Indian and Norwegian governments, and the World Economic Forum, among others. Heeney and colleagues face a challenge that has long proved insurmountable for scientists: to develop vaccines that can not only protect against a single coronavirus, but multiple strains, varieties, and perhaps even entire families of them.