THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN Monday, October 5, 2020
Vol. 130, No. 14
COLLEGIAN.COM
Tessa Maldonado uses a bioreactor in Colorado State University’s Infectious Disease Research Center April 26, 2019. PHOTO BY RYAN SCHMIDT THE COLLEGIAN
CSU researchers develop COVID-19 vaccine candidate By Laura Studley @laurastudley_
Colorado State University’s newly developed SolaVAX vaccination may be one of the solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers at CSU have been awarded a $3.1 million contract from the National Institutes of Health, allowing for
work to continue on the University’s vaccination candidate. “I feel very honored about getting the funds from the NIH and thrilled with the opportunity to be able to contribute collectively to this issue for COVID-19 and how to treat and how to prevent it,” said Raymond Goodrich, principal investigator for the project and executive director of the Infec-
tious Disease Research Center at CSU. The contract assists with the University’s Bio-pharmaceutical Manufacturing and Academic Resource Center to “produce strains of the coronavirus” for the vaccine, according to CSU SOURCE. Fourth-year student and BioMARC employee Maddux Kimball said that COVID-19 is
arguably one of the most universal events to occur in the last 100 years. “For that reason, the discovery of a vaccine would be of acute benefit of the entire planet,” Kimball wrote in a message to The Collegian. “I believe the discovery of a COVID-19 vaccine would be on a similar scale to that of a smallpox vaccine.” SolaVAX is based on a
method Goodrich developed over 20 years ago. Originally, this method was intended to purify blood transfusions by inactivating viruses, bacteria and parasites that may have been in the donor’s blood, Goodrich stated. This would allow blood recipients to receive clean blood. see VACCINE on page 3 >>