The need to rapidly develop a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 comes at a time of explosion in basic scientific understanding, including in areas such as genomics and structural biology, that is supporting a new era in vac-cine development. Over the past decade, the scientific community and the vaccine industry have been asked to respond urgently to epi-demics of H1N1 inf luenza, Ebola, Zika, and now SARS-CoV-2.