Efforts have also been boosted by the development of some ingenious new technologies for examining the protective capabilities of vaccines against coronaviruses that have not yet spread to humans. VBI Vaccines, who are developing a pan-sarbecoronavirus vaccine that would target the close relatives of Covid-19. Their approach is similar to that of Bjorkman's lab, and involves taking the genetic sequences of various coronaviruses found in bats and pangolins, from publicly available databases, and inserting them into a pseudotype virus. This is a virus that has been genetically altered so it cannot replicate, making it harmless and allowing scientists to test their vaccine against these novel pathogens in a test tube.
