UT-Austin Researchers Map New Coronavirus Toward Vaccine Creation

AUSTIN, TX — University of Texas at Austin researchers have collaborated with National Institutes of Health counterparts in making a critical breakthrough in efforts to develop a vaccine for the new coronavirus. Their work involves creating the first 3-D atomic-scale map showing the part of the virus that attaches to and infects human cells.

Now officially called COVID-19, the respiratory ailment is caused by a member of the coronavirus family that is a close cousin to the SARS and MERS viruses that have caused outbreaks in the past. Some 74,000 cases of the respiratory ailment have been recorded — resulting in some 2,000 deaths — largely centered in China.

In mapping the part of the virus called the spike protein, researchers have taken an essential step so researchers around the world can develop vaccines and antiviral drugs to combat the virus, researches explained.

The paper was scheduled to publish on Wednesday in the journal Science. The scientific team also is working on a related viable vaccine candidate stemming from the research, researchers said.

Image provided by UT-Austin.

School officials said Jason McLellan, associate professor at UT Austin who led the research, and his colleagues have spent many years studying other coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV. They had already developed methods for locking coronavirus spike proteins into a shape that made them easier to analyze and could effectively turn them into candidates for vaccines. This experience gave them an advantage over other research teams studying the novel virus, officials said.

“As soon as we knew this was a coronavirus, we felt we had to jump at it because we could be one of the first ones to get this structure," McLellan said in a statement. "We knew exactly what mutations to put into this, because we’ve already shown these mutations work for a bunch of other coronaviruses.”

The bulk of the research was carried out by the study’s co-first authors, doctoral student Daniel Wrapp and research associate Nianshuang Wang, both at UT-Austin.

Research associate Nianshuang Wang (right) and graduate student Daniel Wrapp review cryo-EM images Monday in the Sauer Structural Biology Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin. (Photo by Vivian Abagiu/University of Texas at Austin)

Just two weeks after receiving the genome sequence of the virus from Chinese researchers, officials said, the team had designed and produced samples of their stabilized spike protein. It took about 12 more days to reconstruct the 3-D atomic-scale map, called a molecular structure, of the spike protein and submit a manuscript to Science, which expedited its peer review process, school officials added.

The many steps involved in this process would typically take months to accomplish, researchers noted.

Critical to the success, researchers noted, was state-of-the-art technology known as cryogenic electron microscopy — cryo-EM — in UT Austin’s new Sauer Structural Biology Laboratory. Cryo-EM allows researchers to make atomic-scale 3-D models of cellular structures, molecules and viruses.

“We ended up being the first ones in part due to the infrastructure at the Sauer Lab,” McLellan said. “It highlights the importance of funding basic research facilities.”

The molecule the team produced, and for which it obtained a structure, represents only the extracellular portion of the spike protein, but it is enough to elicit an immune response in people, and thus serve as a vaccine, he said.

Next, McLellan’s team plans to use its molecule to pursue another line of attack against the virus that causes COVID-19, using the molecule as a “probe” to isolate naturally produced antibodies from patients who have been infected with the new coronavirus and successfully recovered. Researchers explained that in large enough quantities, these antibodies could help treat a coronavirus infection soon after exposure. For example, the antibodies could protect soldiers or health care workers sent into an area with high infection rates on too short notice for the immunity from a vaccine to take effect.

Barney Graham, deputy director of the NIH’s Vaccine Research Center (VRC) in Bethesda, Maryland, helped supervise experiments and co-write the manuscript.

The study’s other co-authors are Kizzmekia Corbett and Olubukola Abiona at the VRC; and Jory Goldsmith and Ching-Lin Hsieh at UT-Austin.

Wang, Corbett, Graham and McLellan are inventors on a U.S. patent application for the structure of coronavirus spike proteins in the prefusion conformation and their use in therapeutics. Wrapp, Wang, Corbett, Abiona, Graham and McLellan are inventors on a U.S. patent application for the vaccine candidate described in this release.

This work was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The Sauer Structural Biology Laboratory is supported by The University of Texas at Austin’s College of Natural Sciences and by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.