VIC Pivots to Address COVID-19 Pandemic
The VIC team is working with its academic collaborators and Voltron Therapeutics to develop a new vaccine designed to protect individuals from infection from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. VIC is leveraging its Self-Assembling Vaccine (SAV) platform developed under the Department of Defense funded VaxCelerate program to get this done under an accelerated timetable. The VaxCelerate platform has the potential to accelerate the time between pathogen isolation and vaccine development, allowing for the production and pre-clinical testing of a new vaccine against specific pathogen targets in less than 120 days. Our goal is to rapidly develop and test a vaccine that could help the population at large, and especially individuals who are at increased risk for the most serious complications of COVID-19 infection.
VIC is also advancing technologies needed to manage the risk of COVID-19 infection at work through the detection of infection and immunity to enable workers to return to productive employment. VIC is working with a leader in antibody technology and assay development, the locally based Cell Signaling Technology, to develop new technologies to diagnose COVID-19 and to understand the antibody response at high resolution.