Cracking the Code of a Universal Flu Vaccine: The Breakthrough at UNCW
When Dr. Ying Wang moved his research program from MIT to UNC Wilmington in 2015, he wasn’t looking for a beach town or a lifestyle shift. He was looking for a place where scientific ideas could move — not just toward publication, but toward real products that could solve real global problems.
UNCW, he discovered, had that culture.
“I visited UNCW back in 2015, and it was freezing in Boston,” Dr. Wang remembered. “I got off the plane and said, ‘This weather is amazing!’ But most importantly, after I visited and talked to my colleagues, I thought this is a wonderful campus and department. People care about each other, they help each other, we’re enthusiastic about the research. I didn’t regret it because here I am 10 years later.”
That collaborative environment became the home for one of the most ambitious goals in modern biochemistry: developing a potential universal flu vaccine.
For decades, researchers around the world have tried to create a single vaccine capable of protecting against all forms of influenza — including new strains and pandemic-level threats. Yet despite enormous effort, no broadly protective vaccine exists.
“People have been putting effort into flu prevention for several decades and we still don’t have a broadly protective vaccine,” Dr. Wang said. The stakes are clear: the 1918 flu remains the deadliest modern pandemic, and the virus’s life cycle almost guarantees another global outbreak. “From the standpoint of all society, this needs to be resolved.”
The scientific barrier hasn’t been the virus’s genetics. It has been its shape. A vaccine must mimic the precise 3D structure used by the flu virus to bind to human cells — a structure that is stable on the virus but notoriously unstable when engineered in the lab.
“On the virus’s surface is a part that binds to the human receptor — it’s the key the virus uses to open the human cell and enter it. That key has a constant shape,” Dr. Wang explained. A vaccine that mimics that stable shape could theoretically provide broad protection.
For years, that key shape kept collapsing when replicated synthetically. But recent advances in computational modeling and AI-driven design changed the equation. Dr. Wang and his team were able to engineer a molecular “scaffolding” sturdy enough to support the correct shape — allowing them, for the first time, to create a stable mimic of that universal target.
That breakthrough opened the door for a candidate vaccine. But turning that early success into a potential product requires substantial resources.
“To test this, to even make the vaccine, needs a lot of resources,” Dr. Wang said. “We went through six runs of design, and each run we designed hundreds of molecules. Even with the computer helping us narrow it down, we still need to test the effectiveness of the compound for hundreds of variations — that costs a lot of money.”
This is where NCInnovation enters the story.
With NCInnovation funding, Dr. Wang is now in the pre-clinical research stage — generating the data needed to move toward Phase 1 clinical trials. Traditional federal grants often take years and are designed for low-risk, incremental research. High-risk, high-reward work like this rarely receives timely support.
“At this stage of our research, it’s very difficult to get private investment,” Dr. Wang said. “And if we apply for a traditional research grant, that could take years. You apply, get rejected, apply again — the NIH research project would take six years or more. Then it’ll be too late for product development.”
“NCInnovation support allows us to do pretty much everything we need right now,” he continued. Beyond research funding, Dr. Wang has also worked with NCInnovation’s entrepreneur-in-residence to explore the commercialization pathway. If the vaccine continues to show promise, he anticipates launching a startup and partnering with a larger pharmaceutical company — an approach he believes gives the technology the best chance of reaching patients.
