A new vaccine for Hantavirus is in the pipeline

US based pharmaceutical company Moderna confirmed that it is working on developing Hanta virus vaccines in cooperation with the Vaccine Innovation Center of Korea University College of Medicine (VIC-K). This comes after an outbreak of the Hanta virus on board a Dutch cruise ship that sailed from Argentina and disembarked its passengers and crew in the Canary Islands on May 10. At least three people on board the MV Hondius He died, and several serious cases were reported.

Moderna is a biotechnology company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that created messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Following the announcement that Moderna was developing a vaccine for Hantavirus using this same technology, the drug manufacturer’s stock rose from $49 on May 7 to $55 the next day. But it’s important to note that Moderna did not begin work on immunization in the wake of the outbreak at MV Hondius. In fact, the pharmaceutical company implemented this collaborative project with VIC-K in 2023.

The fight for the vaccine

The outbreak of Hantavirus on the high seas has been one of the major international events in recent weeks, meaning that many people around the world have only just learned about the existence of this virus – but it is not a new arrival. In fact, Hantavirus has been a known pathogen for decades. It is transmitted mainly through exposure to the droppings, urine, or saliva of infected rodents, and can cause hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (prevalent in Asia or Europe) or Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (more common in the Americas). Actor Gene Hackman’s wife may be one of the most famous people to die from the recent illness, but she’s not an exceptional phenomenon. Overall, hantaviruses cause about 50,000 serious and often fatal infections worldwide each year. So-called New World hantaviruses, such as Andean hantaviruses (ANDV), are found mostly in South America and can have a case fatality rate of up to 40 percent; ANDV is the only Hantavirus for which human-to-human transmission has been documented, and is the variant identified by the World Health Organization in MV Hondius.

There is currently no vaccine to prevent ANDV infection, and the Spanish Society of Immunology confirms that “there is no licensed vaccine for Hantavirus in Europe, the United States, or Latin America.” Treatment strategies focus on the life cycle of the virus, host immune factors, or clinical management of symptoms.

South Korea is a partial exception to this picture. The country records between 300 and 400 cases annually, most of them among young people in their twenties and thirties, and the country’s health authorities have included the pathogen in the list of nine priority threats to prepare for future epidemics. There is an inactivated, previous-generation vaccine called Hantavax in Korea, but its limited efficacy and production methodology — it is derived from animal brain tissue — keep it far from modern standards.

South Korea was the starting point for Moderna’s most advanced cooperation in this field. The biotechnology company and VIC-K signed an R&D agreement in September 2023 under the US company’s mRNA Access initiative, a program that provides mRNA vaccine candidates in the pre-clinical phase to academic teams working on emerging or neglected infectious diseases.

The collaboration mechanism works as follows: the Korean team provides the Hantavirus antigen sequence information, and Moderna provides the corresponding mRNA. Preliminary results of this early research are already available. In February 2025, Park Man-sung’s team from the Department of Microbiology confirmed that experimental doses prevented Hantavirus infection in mice.

A vaccine may take years to arrive

The distance between a mouse trial and a licensed vaccine for humans is great, especially when there is no longer a sense of urgency of the pandemic or government support for Operation Warp Speed. The candidate vaccine is still in the pre-clinical stage, meaning it has not yet begun human trials and faces significant financing and regulatory hurdles before that happens.

In addition, hantaviruses are diverse and have regional differences. Designing a vaccine capable of protecting against multiple strains is a complex task. Precisely for this reason, this international collaboration seeks to develop broad-based immunization that is effective against a greater number of variants than existing vaccines in Asia.