The new vaccine, trademarked as SKYCovione, is a “second-generation” protein-based immunization approved for patient use by the Korean Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, with pending authorization in the U.K. and other countries. SKYCovione is more stable than the more common mRNA COVID vaccines and could enable broader vaccination efforts in parts of the world where medical and storage resources are harder to find.

The vaccine technology will be licensed as royalty-free for the duration of the pandemic and will focus on providing shots to under-vaccinated countries.

“We’ve heard stories about wealthy counties giving doses to lower- and middle-income countries, and then … pointing fingers at receiving countries for not being able to use them [before they expire],” said David Veesler, UW Medicine biochemistry professor and co-developer. “These are anecdotes, but they’re still stories that happen…these superior storage properties might make a huge difference to reach people who still have not received vaccines.”

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After closely monitoring more than 200 COVID-19 patients for two to three months following their first signs of illness, studies show that four factors may put patients at a predisposition for long-COVID: Pre-existing Type 2 diabetes, autoantibodies from autoimmune diseases like lupus, the presence of COVID-19 RNA in blood instead of just in saliva like most patients, and the existence of Epstein Barr virus in an individual’s blood.

“Lupus treatments may likely have high relevance…That is an excellent area for further exploration,” said James Heath, lead author of the study and president of the Institute for Systems Biology.

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“The first-generation vaccines were incredibly important, but they are not sufficient to take us through this pandemic or for the next pandemic,” said IDRI CEO Corey Casper, M.D., MPH.

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The company expects it will have the opportunity to file for emergency use authorization with the FDA in the near future for initial use with medical professionals. The Anavasi Diagnostics team predicts they will request additional approvals for their product to be used in a home setting in the coming months.

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“To end this pandemic, we need to ensure that everyone, no matter where they live in the world, has access to life-saving health products. The unjust reality, however, is that low-income countries have had to wait for everything from personal protective equipment to vaccines,” said Melinda French Gates, Gates Foundation co-chair.

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Bedford began working at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in 2013, working with flu research and helping to launch Nextstrain. Later he worked on viral diseases such as Zika and Ebola. Samples Bedford collected from the Seattle Flu Study led to one of the first detected COVID-19 cases in Washington state.

“[The Flu Study] was designed around a pandemic early-warning system, where the key idea was that you can’t just have something that turns on in the case of a pandemic…You want a surveillance system that’s responding to seasonal respiratory virus… But I definitely did not think or have foresight that this would [detect] a once-in-a-hundred-years pandemic in year two of a study like this,” said Trevor Bedford, HHMI recipient and computational biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

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“Your immune system knows about every disease you have…If we could just ask the immune system what it knows, we would be able to diagnose every disease,” said Harlan Robins, chief scientific officer at Adaptive.

The company was created by two brothers out of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in 2009. Today Adaptive Biotechnologies has a staff of 800 employees is valued at approximately $5.5B.

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Some of the developments in COVID-19 vaccines in the area included an early clinical trial for the Moderna vaccine at Kaiser Permanente, a clinical trial for a protein-based vaccine by Icosavax and clinical trials for an RNA-based vaccine developed by HDT Bio.

“Virology and immunology are two big areas of research intensiveness in the state of Washington, and particularly in the greater Puget Sound,” said Dr. Leslie Alexandre, CEO of the industry group Life Science Washington. “There’s been this entire pipeline.”

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The company’s vaccine development has been aided by a contract with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease at the National Institutes of Health and its aim is to produce a candidate that is easy to manufacture and distribute globally. In a previous statement, HDT Bio CEO and president Steve Reed said: “An important part of HDT’s mission is establishing value-sharing partnerships with drug companies in historically underserved countries. Our goal is to empower our partners to produce and distribute innovative medicines at affordable prices.”

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