It’s all hands on deck amongst Ontario’s research community to find treatments and ultimately a vaccine for COVID-19, and though both are likely months away, major progress is being made.
At Western University, researchers are looking at how the virus gets into a person’s cells. The coronavirus spike protein is found on a virus’s surface and binds to specific cell receptors, this process is the first in infection.
The team at Western is coupling spike proteins from SARS-CoV- 2 with proteins of different viruses that don’t harm the human body. “The idea is to train our immune system to recognize this spike protein.