In this talk, I will describe our group’s efforts to develop real, working therapeutics that would be effective against both current and future strains of COVID-like viruses. Among the many painful historical lessons that we have learned or re-learned as a result of the recent COVID pandemic, we have developed a new respect for the facility of viral evolution to repeatedly render existing therapeutics, both vaccines and antibodies, obsolete. Are we doomed to forever play a cat-and-mouse game with viruses, with future unpleasant surprises lurking in zoonotic reservoirs? Is there any way to parley our atomic-level understanding of the action of biomolecules to explore the space of molecular possibilities in order to conceive, design and develop a molecule that would be a “universal vaccine”? Or an antibody that could block infection for the next latent variant of SARS-CoV-2? We are a group of both physicists and microbiologists working on addressing these challenges. In this talk I’ll discuss our proposed solutions.