On Mar. 10, 2020, CaroGen and scientists from Yale announced they had begun work on a vaccine targeting the coronavirus responsible for the ongoing global outbreak of COVID-19 disease. The team is basing its approach on previous work done by CaroGen co-founder and scientific chairman, John Rose, in the wake of the global SARS epidemic of 2003. The coronaviruses that cause SARS and COVID-19 are genetically similar.

Rose, who is director of the Yale School of Medicine’s molecular virology program, worked with others to develop a vaccine shown to be protective in animal models against the SARS virus. “The foundation for a novel COVID-19 vaccine was established in our laboratory over a decade ago,” Rose said in a statement. “We hope to select candidate(s) for human clinical studies within the next several months.”

COVID-19 isn’t the first outbreak that has spurred CaroGen to take action. The company, which is developing vaccines and immunotherapies for cancer and infectious diseases including hepatitis B, planned a collaboration with Yale and UConn in 2016 on a Zika virus vaccine, after a global outbreak that began the year prior.