In March 2020, the world changed in the blink of an eye as countries around the world locked down to slow the spread of COVID-19. This often deadly disease, caused by a previously unknown coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2, seeded outbreaks across the globe in record time. By the end of 2022, it had killed more than 6 million people worldwide.
But COVID-19 was far from humanity’s first pandemic. As recently as 15 years ago, an outbreak of pandemic flu sickened 60 million people globally. In 2003, a new disease called severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, sickened more than 8,000 people worldwide. It was caused by a virus called SARS-associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV). No one can predict when the next pandemic will happen—only that one eventually will.
These recent pandemics have brought into stark relief the need to be prepared for the next emerging disease, whenever it arrives. To this end, NIH-funded research teams have been working to develop universal vaccines against diseases with pandemic potential. Unlike current vaccines, which confer immunity to one or several strains of a disease, universal vaccines are designed to teach the immune system to defend against all versions of a pathogen—even versions that don’t exist yet. They do this by targeting an element of the pathogen that remains the same across all strains and types.