Researchers at the University of Texas announced Wednesday they have made a critical breakthrough toward developing a vaccine for the new coronavirus, which has resulted in the deaths of 2,000 people and infected 75,000, most of them in mainland China.

The development, published Wednesday in the journal Science, is an essential step toward developing vaccines and antiviral drugs to combat the virus, UT said in a statement.

Jason McLellan, a UT associate professor of molecular biosciences, led a team of researchers in creating the first 3D atomic-scale map of the spike protein — the part of the virus that attaches to and infects human cells. McLellan and his colleagues had a leg up on the process, having already spent many years studying SARS and MERS, viruses that are in the same family as the new coronavirus and have caused outbreaks in the past.

The researchers already had developed methods of locking coronavirus spike proteins into a shape that made them easier to analyze and could effectively turn them into candidates for vaccines.

"As soon as we knew this was a coronavirus, we felt we had to jump at it," McLellan said. "Because we could be one of the first ones to get this structure. We knew exactly what mutations to put into this, because we’ve already shown these mutations work for a bunch of other coronaviruses."

Two weeks after receiving the virus’ genome sequence from Chinese researchers, the UT team had designed and produced samples of their stabilized spike protein. It took 12 more days to reconstruct the 3D atomic scale map of the spike protein and submit a manuscript to the journal — which expedited the peer review process, something that would normally take months.

The researchers, who included UT Ph.D. student Daniel Wrapp and research associate Nianshuang Wang, used an advanced technology known as cryogenic electron microscopy in UT’s Sauer Laboratory for Structural Biology to create an atomic-scale 3D model of the virus.

"We ended up being the first ones in part due to the infrastructure at the Sauer Lab," McLellan said. "It highlights the importance of funding basic research facilities."

The team plans to use their molecule as a probe to isolate naturally produced antibodies from patients who contracted the new coronavirus and successfully recovered. In large enough quantities, the antibodies could help treat a coronavirus infection soon after exposure, UT said.

The UT team also worked with researchers at the National Institutes of Health’s Vaccine Research Center in Bethesda, Md. Barney Graham, deputy director of the center, helped supervise experiments and co-wrote the manuscript. The study’s other co-authors include Kizzmekia Corbett and Olubukola Abiona at the Vaccine Research Center and Jory Goldsmith and Ching-Lin Hsieh at UT.

Wrapp, Wang, Corbett, Abiona, Graham and McLellan are inventors on a U.S. patent application for a coronavirus vaccine candidate.