The La Jolla Institute for Immunology, in San Diego, California, has received a $2.6 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to work on their ambitious project to potentially prevent future pandemics.

Researchers believe they could build on the research and development used to create the current crop of COVID-19 vaccines to prevent other similar viruses.

Dr Erica Ollmann Saphire (pictured), president of the La Jolla Institute, said that her team hopes their research could prevent the need to constantly launch new vaccines for different viruses.

we need a single vaccine that's going to protect against SARS-CoV-2 variants and whatever coronavirus emerges next,' Dr Erica Ollmann Saphire, president of the La Jolla Institute, said in a statement.

'The stability of VFLIP, its robust production and its ability to elicit a potent, long-lasting antibody response capable of neutralizing the infectivity of different variants of [Covid] make this immunogen an excellent tool for the design of novel pan-coronavirus vaccines,' said Dr Eduardo Olmedillas, who is leading the research at La Jolla, said in a statement.

The most well known coronavirus before COVID-19 was severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), a virus that originated in China and quickly spread across the world, causing an epidemic in 2003.

The COVID-19 vaccine is the first coronavirus vaccine to become available to the public

The COVID-19 vaccine is the first coronavirus vaccine, making it a base for development of jabs for similar viruses