[bright music] - [Narrator] Well the last couple of years have been just incredibly intense.

You have to understand though, that this is what the Human Vaccine Institute is for.

Our niche is to respond to the needs of society on problems that are not immediately attractive to the pharmaceutical industry because they're so difficult.

- [Announcer] To really understand what researchers at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute are searching for, you have to go back [bright music] to a 13th century legend, to this guy, King Arthur.

Who sent his Knight of the round table on a quest for the holy grail.

That term is now a metaphor for anything eagerly sought after.

And after the COVID-19 pandemic that killed more than 6 million people, and disrupted life across the entire planet, the holy grail for these scientists is creating a vaccine that protects against all kinds of coronaviruses.

- Do you know, we've had three epidemics now of coronaviruses.

We had SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome that occurred in 2003.

We had middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, MERS, that occurred in the Middle East, and then we have SARS-CoV-2 that arose from a bat virus in China.

There's reason to expect there'll be another, and that candidate will be somewhere on the universe of coronaviruses.

- [Announcer] A vaccine that addresses a broad array of coronaviruses could stop a future pandemic.

That type of vaccine is called a PAM vaccine.

- I have a picture here of the SARS-CoV-2.

- Receptors on those spikes are how the virus infects us.

- So the virus uses these red spikes on its surface to physically attach to cells of the respiratory system either the upper respiratory system in our nose, or down in our lungs and uses this molecule to infect our cells.

- [Announcer] But those receptors can also be targeted by antibodies and prevented from binding to human cells.

- So this is a model of an antibody.

- [Announcer] Vaccines teach our bodies to make antibodies and those antibodies block viruses from attaching to the cells in our bodies and creating infections.

- Then I have here a model of this red molecule, the spike protein.

So this is the spike protein that is present on all over a SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Within the spike protein, there are pieces of it that bind to that post protein that it uses to infect our cells and that is called the receptor binding to domain or RBD.

This is the piece of the spike protein to which this antibody binds to prevent it from infecting.

So by physically binding here, it blocks the infection of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

- [Announcer] The key to creating a PAM vaccine, is finding a common receptor between many types of coronaviruses that an antibody can bind onto.

- But we have the concept, we have a pathway forward for how we expect to make the universal coronavirus vaccine.

And so that's what the team here is working on is really getting the data to show that this works.

- [Announcer] A COVID two vaccine developed at Duke and now in clinical trials, may point the way to creating a PAM vaccine.

- This is how the vaccine is constructed.

So if you've ever looked at a soccer ball, you'll know that it has tiny hexagons that come together to make the largest sphere, so that's shown here.

And to the sphere, we basically use it as a scaffold where we can take a small piece of a virus, which part of the virus that we really want the immune system to see and focus on.

And then we can array it around the surface of this spherical soccer ball like scaffold.

And that allows us a really potent way of being able to target that specific piece of the virus.

- [Announcer] Early studies show the vaccine generates a strong immune response to the virus that causes COVID-19.

- So that's how the vaccine has been designed is to really activate the immune system to see a specific site.

And in this animation it shows a blue molecule that's the receptor bind domain from SARS-CoV-2.

And so that blue molecule gets a array around the surface of the molecule, the scaffold and it makes the overall nanoparticle.

- [Announcer] But what if you placed pieces of other types of coronaviruses on that scaffold?

- So what we know right now is that with one receptor body domain you can induce a broad neutralizing antibody response, so these are the antibodies that block infection.

But that can only get you so far.

So that covers a certain number of viruses, but to really go towards a universal coronavirus vaccine where you really are covering the majority of coronaviruses, we know that we're gonna need more than just one.

And so this technology is amenable to that, meaning that you can then take multiple pieces of viruses from multiple different coronaviruses and array it and show it to the immune system.

- [Announcer] That's the holy grail researchers are scrambling to find.

- Which parts of those of the spike protein are similar among all these viruses.

- So I think with the upfront work that we're doing now to really put in place the technology for manufacturing, we'll be able to move this really quickly once we decide on what's the right mix of coronaviruses for us to target.