Chilean researchers seek $7M to advance hantavirus vaccine to human trials

María Inés Barría sits in a laboratory at the Universidad San Sebastián in Santiago, describing the moment her team watched hamsters survive what should have killed them. The animals had been infected with lethal doses of hantavirus, then treated with antibodies her team had developed over more than a decade. All of them lived. One of the antibodies even stopped the virus from replicating in the lungs. It was the kind of breakthrough that makes scientists want to shout—and it happened in 2018. Now, in 2026, Barría is asking for $7 million to take that discovery into human trials, racing against a virus that kills one in three people it infects and for which no specific treatment exists.

The hantavirus has never been a priority for pharmaceutical companies. It is rare, geographically confined, and until recently, invisible to the world's attention. But the virus that circulates in South America—particularly in Chile and Argentina—is different from its cousins elsewhere. The Andes strain is the only known variant that spreads directly from person to person, transmitted through contact with infected rodents called colilargos, native to the region. Two weeks before Barría spoke to journalists, a cruise ship became a sudden and terrible proof of that danger: ten people infected, three dead. The outbreak shattered the disease's obscurity and forced the world to pay attention.

In Chile alone, the numbers are stark. So far this year, 41 cases have been recorded and 14 people have died—a fatality rate of 34 percent. The disease is endemic to rural areas, where people are most likely to encounter the wild rodents that carry it. Barría, who grew up in Puerto Montt, a Patagonian city a thousand kilometers south of Santiago, knows the landscape and the stakes. She has spent twelve years studying how the human immune system responds to the Andes strain, work that began when she examined blood serum from survivors and noticed something crucial: the antibodies in their blood were key to their survival.

Her team characterized and developed two fully human recombinant antibodies—engineered in the laboratory but genetically identical to those found in nature. They sent them to the Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana, part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and to the Robert Koch Institute in Germany. In both places, the antibodies were tested on Syrian golden hamsters that had been exposed to potentially lethal doses of hantavirus. The results were unambiguous: every treated animal survived. The research was published in Science Translational Medicine in 2018, a significant validation from one of the world's most rigorous scientific journals.

But validation alone does not move research forward. The pandemic redirected funding streams and left countless studies stranded. Barría's work entered what she calls a kind of dormancy. The next phase requires something different from what came before: manufacturing the antibodies in a laboratory certified for Good Manufacturing Practice, then testing them in human patients. This is not prevention, as traditional vaccines are. This is a therapeutic approach—stimulating the immune system to fight a disease already present in the body. It is also expensive and time-consuming. Barría estimates that reaching human trials will require at least $7 million and between 12 and 24 months just to return to where the research stood before the pandemic interrupted it.

The recent cruise ship outbreak has changed the calculus. International attention is now focused on hantavirus and the Andes strain in particular. Barría acknowledges that this moment of visibility may generate the incentives needed from industry and government funders. She also recognizes what has made her work possible so far: international cooperation, both public and private, from laboratories in the United States and Germany, from colleagues across disciplines, from the university that housed her team. Science, she says, requires will and collective effort. The question now is whether the world's sudden awareness of hantavirus will translate into the resources needed to move from hamsters to humans—and whether it will happen before the next outbreak reminds everyone why this matters.