I would probably try to help an existing initiative that has already modelled all the necessary biological and molecular requirements around viruses and vaccines. These are hurdles and deep knowledge that need expertise far beyond the developers’ typical background.
For instance these guys:
Going forward, I think this is an area where artificial intelligence can support improved and much faster medical trials in the health sector. There are many companies working in this domain (development of medicines using machine learning or other AI techniques) but perhaps the development of a vaccine is still a very hard one to simulate and crack (the complexity of our immunitary system?). Much more complicated than regular medicines.
We might need to wait for Quantum Computers to become large enough before we can simulate such complex interactions (virus / immunitary system) at speed, and help develop vaccines in a very short time. We are probably 5+ years away from that, so we are still at “brute force” algorithms and starting to work on “Quantum-inspired” ways to simplify these problems (using traditional hardware but algorithms that mimic the workings of QC).
My friends at Rahko (https://rahko.ai/) are experts in this field, combining Quantum Computing and Machine Learning, to support pharmaceuticals research. Unfortunately still too early for this to have an impact on Covid-19 research.
