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A year ago, in January, when John Mascola heard that a new coronavirus had been detected in an animal market in Wuhan, China, he left everything at his desk on the fourth floor of the US government’s Vaccine Research Center and walked up one flight of stairs to the office of a longtime colleague, Nicole Doria-Rose. Felicitously, Mascola, who is the center’s director, had been working on ways to immunize people against coronaviruses. A vaccine against this new bug, soon to be known as SARS-CoV-2, was the first priority, the only surefire way of halting the growing pandemic. Mascola and Doria-Rose, an immunologist, go way back. And they hoped there was another approach that might also contribute to the cause, one they’d been chasing for more than a decade. They wanted to find a monoclonal antibody.