The path to rapid development of a COVID-19 vaccine was cleared by a research collaboration between scientists at the NIH Vaccine Research Center at NIAID, the Scripps Research Institute, Dartmouth College and the University of Texas-Austin. The 2020 nonexclusive license of the stabilized spike protein discovery from that collaboration to BioNTech - with that company's subsequent partnership with Pfizer producing an mRNA-based vaccine first launched in 2020 administered over 178 million times.
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