Coronaviruses — you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily, spike protein drives a lot of what happen with coronavirus, in zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can build the protein, and we work a lot with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this. Insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab. So you can get more predictive when you find a sequence. You’ve got this diversity. Now the logical progression for vaccines is, if you are going to develop a vaccine for SARS, people are going to use pandemic SARS, but let’s insert some of these other things and get a better vaccine.

Vincent Racaniello

Vincent R. Racaniello (born January 2, 1953 in Paterson, New Jersey) is a Higgins Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is a co-author of a textbook on virology, Principles of Virology.Racaniello has received the Irma T. Hirschl, Searle Scholars, Eli Lilly, Julius Younger and NIH Merit awards. He has also been a Harvey Society Lecturer at Rockefeller University, the Hilleman Lecturer at the University of Chicago, and University Lecturer at Columbia University. He is also the keynote speaker for the American Society for Virology, at its 2018 meeting. Racaniello has served on the editorial boards of scientific journals, including the Journal of Virology, and is a community editor for the open access journal PLOS Pathogens. He also served as the 2015 president of the American Society for Virology and keynote speaker for their 2017 annual meeting.He is the host of the podcast, This Week in Virology.

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