The McMaster connection to a promising Canadian-discovered vaccine for COVID-19

Dr. Chil-Yong (Yong) Kang, Professor of Virology in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Western Ontario, is working round-the-clock these days on a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Kang, who received a PhD in virology from McMaster in 1971, is optimistic that he and his research team are developing a very effective and efficient vaccine and plan to be at the point of starting human clinical trials in the fall of 2020.

And he’s developing it on a system that was born when he was a grad student at Mac.

Kang came to McMaster in 1968 after finishing his training at the Connaught Medical Research Laboratory in the University of Toronto, where he became interested in virology. It was the dawn of research in molecular virology, and McMaster had the largest pool of virology professors in the country. He began the master’s program with Dr. Ludvik Prevec as his supervisor and within a year had published peer reviewed papers in most reputable journals in virology and was switched directly into the PhD program. They began working on a vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) – which is the same virus that Kang has developed as a viral vector for development of viral vaccines including SARS-CoV-2.

“We were the first generation of molecular virologists,” he says. “And what I worked on back then at McMaster is what I’m using to develop the vaccine today after appropriate modification of the virus genes using modern biotechnology.”

To read more about Chil-Yong (Yong) Kang’s path to becoming a virologist at the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Western Ontario, go to the McMaster Alumni website.