On December 30, 2019, Chinese virologist George Fu Gao, director of the National Center for Disease Control in Beijing, saw a piece of information fall on his screen that would soon affect all of humanity: a lung disease of unknown origin had broken out in Wuhan, in central China. Eleven days later, on January 10, 2020, his team has already sequenced the genome of this new corona-virus and shared the results globally. For researchers at the forefront of virology, the Chinese alert is a wake-up call. The pandemic is likely, even inevitable, and they must try to catch it by creating an effective vaccine. Five teams will take the lead in this scientific race.

As news of the coronavirus broke around the globe, a small group of scientists jumped into action to tackle one of the greatest medical challenges of our time: to create a vaccine against a virus no one had ever seen before, and to do so in record time, during a deadly, global pandemic.