The College of Engineering’s Biological Process Development Facility is working with an emerging biotechnology company on a vaccine that could treat patients who have the novel coronavirus and help prevent similar outbreaks in the future.
The vaccine being developed by Vault Pharma, headquartered at the California NanoSystems Institute’s Magnify incubator at the University of California, Los Angeles, could be a complementary weapon to any initial vaccine for COVID-19 treatment.
Vault Pharma creates genetically modified versions of vaults — naturally occurring nanoparticles found in every human cell — as a delivery device for potential therapies or vaccines. The barrel-shaped vaults include a shell of 78 copies of a particular protein, housing two additional proteins and some genetic material.
