The common cold is more than just a nuisance: it is one of the leading causes of community-acquired pneumonia requiring hospitalization in children, and can cause serious problems for people with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The majority of common colds are caused by rhinovirus, but so far scientists haven’t been able to develop a vaccine. Why? Rhinovirus has 170 serotypes (or strains), whereas poliovirus (which is in the same family) only has three. A vaccine for the common cold has been considered by many in the pharma industry to be an insurmountable problem.

But Martin Moore, Associate Professor at Emory University, enjoys a challenge. “I didn’t know if I’d be able to tackle it, but that’s what makes it fun!” says Moore. “We delved into old literature from the 1970s – and found that teams from the University of Virginia, the US National Institutes of Health, and the UK Medical Research Council’s Common Cold Research Unit had shown that a monovalent-killed rhinovirus vaccine could induce protective antibodies and prevent colds when volunteers were challenged with the homologous strain.”