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POTTERING around her kitchen on the morning of 31 December, Kate Broderick scrolled through the headlines while she waited for her tea to brew. One story caught her eye: a mysterious outbreak of severe pneumonia in Wuhan, China. Nearly overnight, the number of cases seemed to explode. “I knew we didn’t have time to wait,” she says.

A molecular geneticist at Inovio Pharmaceuticals in California, Broderick was poised for what came next. When Chinese officials published the genetic sequence of the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus causing the illness just two weeks after the first cases were reported to the World ��ҹ����1000���� Organization, Broderick got to work. Within 3 hours, her team had a prototype vaccine ready for initial testing. It was an unprecedented turnaround, but a moment Broderick and many others had long seen coming.

Making vaccines usually takes a decade or more between development, safety testing and manufacturing, says , head of Gavi, an international group that promotes vaccine use around the world. With global confirmed cases of the new disease, covid-19, surging past 180,000 at the time of writing, time is of the essence.

To speed things up, scientists are turning to untested classes of vaccines, and rethinking every part of how they are designed, evaluated and manufactured. If the approach works, we will, for the first time, have identified a new disease and developed a vaccine against it while the initial outbreak is still ongoing.

But speed can come with downsides. “We could have a vaccine in three weeks, but we can’t guarantee its safety or efficacy,” says Gary Kobinger, a virologist at Laval University in Canada.…