UT honors two scientific heroes who contributed to COVID-19 vaccines

AUSTIN, Texas — On Wednesday, UT’s tower was lit up to honor the researchers who helped make the COVID-19 vaccines possible.

Dr. Barney Graham, former Deputy Director of the NIH’s Vaccine Research Center worked with Jason McLellan, UT Professor of Molecular Biosciences, to help make COVID-19 vaccines possible.

“We’ve been working on coronaviruses since 2013,” McLellan said. “Barney Graham and I and some of our other collaborators we felt that we could be due with another coronavirus ten years later and we should start working on figuring out how to make the best coronavirus vaccine.”

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With over 13 years of researching coronaviruses, their teams engineered a coronavirus spike protein that is used in Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson& Johnson vaccines.

“Dr. McLellan’s group and others, we found this structure, the atomic level structure of the spike protein of human coronaviruses and we learned how to stabilize it into that right shape,” Graham said.

Since then, the two have improved on their original stabilized protein.

“We made a second-generation spike protein here at UT and that’s being licensed out to many different companies. It’s been incorporated into a vaccine that can be produced in low and middle income countries,” McLellan said.

McLellan and Graham continue to work ahead, and they prepare for potential future viruses.

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“More recently we’ve been working on a universal coronavirus vaccine. That way these would protect against sarsv2 and all the different variants, but could potentially protect against the original sars from 2002 or mers from 2012, and most importantly protect against coronaviruses that emerge in the future.”