Newly funded: Establishing a safer vaccine option for COVID-19

A study led by Mythili Dileepan, PhD, will use non-infectious virus-like particles to create a vaccine for COVID-19. Relying on these virus-like particles (which mimic the virus that causes COVID-19), rather than using the actual virus in a vaccine, could stimulate a protective immune response in the human body without the risk of injecting a live virus mutant as a vaccine that can potentially cause disease in humans. The study is funded by the UMN COVID-19 Rapid Response Research Grants program and is slated to wrap up by April 15, 2021. Dileepan and her team in the Ly-Liang laboratory have several years of experience in developing vaccines to treat diseases in humans and livestock.