“Local Team Joins Push for SARS Vaccine”

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Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute in Buffalo, N.Y., has begun work on a vaccine for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and it hopes to be ready to test a candidate vaccine on animals within a year. The government has given the institute samples of the virus that causes SARS, which has infected almost 8,500 people and killed 792. The vaccine would use a dead or weakened virus that would encourage the immune system to develop antibodies, which would allow the body to fight off the disease if contracted. The work of Hauptman-Woodward will be to help identify proteins that help the body produce the antibodies and then replicate them. The work with the proteins might also help the institute find antiviral compounds that could prevent the virus that causes SARS from replicating in the body.

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