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(WSVN) - There could be a big breakthrough in a South Florida lab in the fight against the coronavirus.

A team of doctors have said they are one step closer to developing a vaccine.

Well before we all started social distancing, the husband and wife power team of doctors, Hyeryun Choe and Michael Farzan, had already stopped shaking people’s hands.

They’re leading scientists at Scripps Research in Jupiter.

In early March, a 7News team included the last journalists allowed in before they had to secure the lab to focus on finding a coronavirus vaccine.

Michael Farzan, a Scripps research scientist said, “There’s a protein on the virus whose job is to move the virus into your cells. That protein is the most important target for a vaccine.”

Well, now since our visit, these doctors have discovered that injecting just a sliver of that particular protein into lab rodents produces antibodies in the rodents that neutralize the virus.

In other words, they’ve found a potential vaccine.

Executive Vice President of Scripps Research Doug Bingham said, “So if you think of the whole protein as a pencil, we just cut off the very tip where the lead is and inject that, and that works. That’s important because you can make more of it faster.”

Scripps scientists believe their potential vaccine could be produced in bacteria and not animal cells like many other vaccines.

Bingham said using bacteria to cultivate the protein could shave off six months of getting the potential vaccine to the masses.

Bingham said, “So under an ideal situation you could have a vaccine probably in nine, 12 months as opposed to 12, 18.”

It’s a big breakthrough, but still more testing needs to be done.

Next, the vaccine candidate developed here will need to be tested on an animal larger than a rodent before human clinical trials can begin.

But this has energized these South Florida scientists working so hard to help the whole world.

Bingham said, “They’re all exhausted, and they’re all excited at the same time.”

Scientists at Scripps said a vaccine that will eventually be developed will be usable for many years, and a new one won’t have to be developed for some time.

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