University of Alberta researchers in race against time to create COVID-19 vaccine
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Dr. Michael Houghton
n the movies, scientists race against time to find a vaccine or cure for a contagion. In the real world so, too, are scientists working around the clock across the globe to combat COVID-19 – including Alberta. Researchers in our province have joined the global effort, funded through a partnership between the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and Alberta Innovates. One such researcher is Dr. Michael Houghton, director of the University of Alberta’s Li Ka Shing Applied Virology Institute, part of the Li Ka Shing Institute of Virology, a worldclass centre of excellence. Dr. Houghton is internationally renowned for his co-discovery of the hepatitis C virus in 1989 and for his work in developing a hep C vaccine. Houghton joined the University of Alberta when the Li Ka Shing institute was founded in 2010. Since its beginning, the virology institute also has been supported by Alberta Innovates, the University of Alberta, and the Government of Alberta.
Houghton has been working with his distinguished U of A colleague Dr. Lorne Tyrrell to develop their hep C vaccine and bring it into widespread use. Houghton also developed a promising vaccine for SARS in 2004 in just one year, but it did not go into full production once the SARS virus was contained. Now, Houghton and Tyrrell, along with their talented team of researchers at the U of A, have received $750,000 in total funding from the CIHR and Alberta Innovates to support their efforts to develop a vaccine for COVID19. “We’re in a situation obviously where millions of people are being infected with COVID-19 and a frightening projection from the U.S. that 200,000 people might die.… That is really sobering when you hear projections like that. So obviously the risk (of COVID-19) is huge,” Houghton says.
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