90-Second Read: A New Hantavirus Vaccine Is in the Works

Since 2023, Moderna and Korea University have been developing a new mRNA vaccine for Hantavirus. This comes after an outbreak of Hantavirus occurred on a Dutch cruise ship that sailed from Argentina and disembarked its passengers and crew in the Canary Islands on May 10. Following the announcement that Moderna was developing a Hantavirus vaccine using this same technology, the drugmaker's stock rose from $49 on May 7 to $55 the next day. US-based pharmaceutical company Moderna confirmed that it has been working on the development of Hantavirus vaccines in collaboration with the Vaccine Innovation Center of Korea University College of Medicine (VIC-K). The Hantavirus outbreak on the high seas has been one of the big international events of recent weeks, which means that many people around the world have.

Overall, Hantaviruses cause around 50,000 serious and often fatal infections worldwide each year. The mechanism of the collaboration works like this: The Korean team provides the Hantavirus antigenic sequence information and Moderna supplies the corresponding mRNA material. With respect to Hantavirus, other agencies are working on vaccine development, most notably the long-standing work of the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Moderna is the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotechnology company that perfected messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic. The wife of actor Gene Hackman may be one of the best known recent people to have died from the latter disease, but it is far from being an exceptional phenomenon.

In fact, Hantavirus has been a known pathogen for decades. Transmitted mainly through exposure to the droppings, urine, or saliva of infected rodents, it can cause hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (prevalent in Asia or Europe) or Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (more common in the Americas). In February 2025, Park Man-sung's team from the Department of Microbiology confirmed that experimental doses prevented Hantavirus infection in mice. In addition, Hantaviruses are diverse and have regional variations. The country reports 300 to 400 cases annually, mainly among young men in their 20s and 30s, and the country's health authorities have included the pathogen on their list of nine priority threats for future pandemic preparedness.

The biotech firm and VIC-K signed a research and development agreement in September 2023 under the US company's mRNA Access initiative, a program that provides preclinical-stage mRNA vaccine candidates to academic teams working on emerging or neglected infectious diseases. But the episode reminds us of a lesson from the Covid-19 pandemic: The best time to develop a vaccine against a dangerous virus is before that virus becomes a global emergency. A previous-generation inactivated vaccine called Hantavax exists in Korea, but its limited efficacy and production methodology, it's derived from animal brain tissue, keep it far from modern standards. The distance between a mouse trial and a licensed vaccine for humans is considerable, especially when there is no longer the sense of urgency of the pandemic or the government support of.