Core D: Nonhuman Primates

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PROJECT SUMMARY – CORE D: NONHUMAN PRIMATES COVID-19 has served as a wake-up call regarding the ability of a pathogen to rapidly spread to all confines of the world and establish a lasting pandemic, with considerable disease, death, and economic losses. While preceded by SARS and MERS, COVID-19 turned out markedly more contagious, and for all practical purposes impervious to existing antiviral therapies, leading to extensive spreading as well as giving rise to immunologically distinct mutants with higher transmission fitness. Moreover, COVID-19 is the third coronavirus zoonosis in the 21s century that has been threatening humans, and wildlife and various species of bats in particular have been demonstrated to harbor several other coronaviruses susceptible to transmitting and generating additional epidemics/pandemics. The overarching goal of this program is to design and develop both pan-sarbecovirus and pan-betacoronavirus vaccines to preemptively ward off such widely disseminated zoonotic transmission, using a structure-based immunogen design approach. The goal of Core D (Nonhuman Primates, Villinger) will be to evaluate the most promising immunogens initially screened in rodents, combined with clinically relevant adjuvants to elicit protective humoral and cellular immune responses in cynomolgus macaques, as a model more closely related to humans. The Core will be responsible for conducting the nonhuman primate experiments, from animal procurement, animal characterization, satisfying regulatory requirements, planning and execution of the primate immunizations and sample collections, processing, storage and distributions to collaborating partners of the Program. Results of these studies are expected to iteratively refine and optimize immunogen/adjuvant formulations and provide data leading to the validation of a pan sarbecovirus and a pan betacoronavirus vaccine to be translated to the clinic.