On May 7, 2020, Tonix Pharmaceuticals and the University of Alberta announced a research collaboration and exclusive licensing agreement for three new vaccines for the prevention of COVID-19, the novel coronavirus disease identified in 2019 which is caused by SARS-CoV-2 virus. The new collaboration will develop three new potential vaccines to protect against COVID-19 based on the horsepox vector platform, but designed to express different SARS-CoV-2 antigens than TNX-1800, which is designed to express SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein.