18 Months

Tzyy-Choou “T.-C.” Wu and Chien-Fu Hung

Published in Hopkins Medicine - Summer 2020
The amount of time it could take to develop a vaccine for the new coronavirus and move it into human trials, say two Johns Hopkins researchers, who began work on a vaccine in February. Tzyy-Choou “T.-C.” Wu and Chien-Fu Hung, who run the Cervical Cancer Research Lab at Johns Hopkins, studied severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, in 2002 and 2003 and are drawing on their experience to research this new coronavirus. They aim to do that, they say, either by making a DNA-based vaccine that contains genes that produce the virus’ protein or by making a vaccine that includes a portion of the actual protein. Watch a video interview