On Aug. 20, 2020, the La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) announced that Erica Ollmann Saphire, Ph.D. had been awarded more than $6.4 million from the The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), one of the National Institutes of Health, to support research toward COVID-19 antibody therapeutics.

The funding to LJI fueled ongoing efforts by CoVIC to analyze virus-fighting antibodies and track how the novel coronavirus may attempt to escape those antibodies.