Hantavirus Scientists Were Close to Vaccine But Ran Out of Money

Virologist María Inés Barría remembers the Eureka moment from a decade ago.

Barría and her team in Chile had been working for months on antibodies to treat hantavirus that kills about one-in-three people who contract it. The breakthrough came around 2016, when a telltale fluorescent green glow indicating the presence of the virus disappeared under a microscope.

The antibodies developed in the immunovirology lab at the Universidad de Concepción, about 300 miles south of the capital Santiago, had seemingly neutralized the germ.

“We’re on the right track,” Barría, 48, recalls thinking. “We have to keep going.”

After later success in ...