For Heeney, it turned out to be his first known encounter with the coronavirus. “We eventually determined that it was a coronavirus that had jumped from domestic cats to these cheetahs,” he says. “And because cheetahs were a new host, it caused a lot of death and destruction. So that was my introduction to them.” Four decades on and Heeney is at the helm of DIOSynVax, a Cambridge, UK-based biotech company that recently received a $42m (£34m/€41m) grant from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI ), the Bill and Melinda Gates-backed foundation, the governments of India and Norway, and the World Economic Forum, among others. Heeney and his colleagues are tackling a challenge that has long proved insurmountable for scientists: to develop vaccines that can protect not just against a single coronavirus, but against multiple strains, varieties and perhaps even entire families of them. A similar feat has never been done in the history of virology, since for more than two decades chasing the same goal in influenza did not pay much attention. Some have even compared the project’s ambition, scope and difficulty to the infamous Manhattan Project of the 1940s, which pushed the limits of physics at the time and yielded the world’s first atomic bomb. Money is being thrown at the target in unprecedented amounts. CEPI has allocated an initial budget of around $200m (£169m/€193m), with the NIH adding a further $36m (£30m/€35m) to the pot. Buoyed by its success in developing one of the first Covid-19 vaccines, Moderna recently jumped into the fray, announcing its intention to produce a vaccine that could protect against all four coronaviruses that cause the common cold. Heeney knows the road ahead better than anyone, having also spent the past few years trying to develop a single vaccine that can protect against different viral hemorrhagic fevers – Ebola, Marburg virus and Lassa fever. “We take a similar approach,” he says. “It’s all about looking at the structural biology, the genetic relationships, what changes in these viruses and what doesn’t.”
