$65 Million Funds Vaccine Candidate Targeting Multiple Coronaviruses

Over the past two decades, coronaviruses (CoV) have caused three significant disease outbreaks: severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), and coronavirus disease 2019.

Diseases such as MERS continue to cause severe outcomes. There have been a total of 19 MERS-CoV cases reported worldwide since the beginning of 2025, including four fatalities.

To address these diseases with a single vaccine, a candidate designed to provide broad protection against coronaviruses has entered clinical testing.

The vaccine, named GBP511, is built on a self-assembling nanoparticle technology developed by researchers at UW Medicine and the Institute for Protein Design. The South Korean pharmaceutical company SK bioscience is conducting human clinical trials for this vaccine.

GBP511 builds on technology validated through SKYCovione, a vaccine that became the world's first computer-designed medicine to achieve regulatory approval.

In preclinical studies, GBP511 has shown the ability to protect animals from related viruses not directly targeted by the vaccine.

"The beauty of this approach is that by presenting the immune system with multiple related antigens at once, we can train it to recognize features that are conserved across the entire sarbecovirus family," explained David Veesler, a professor of biochemistry at UW Medicine and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, who led the preclinical studies, in a press release on February 3, 2026.

He added, "That's exactly what you need to prepare for unpredictable future threats."

The international Phase 1/2 trial began enrolling participants in January 2026 and will assess safety and immune responses in approximately 368 healthy adults in Perth, Western Australia. The study's results are expected by 2028.

The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations has supported the GBP511 program with approximately $65 million in funding.