Viral diseases aren't curable, and the cold is a huge range of mild viruses, not just one thing, making a vaccine hard. But you know that fancy new mRNA stuff we used for the COVID vaccines is supposed to work really well for addressing a lot of those cold viruses in testing, the question is getting a mix that inoculates against enough different viruses to be effective.
There was an interesting idea during COVID that IIRC was being funded by the DOD where there was a 20 sided molecule for a vaccine where each face could be programmed to inoculate against a different virus. It wasn't progressing as fast as the mRNA stuff that wound up working best and fastest, but there was a lot of talk that that could be the base for a real cold vaccine- you didn't need that for COVID, where you only had 1 or 2 dominant strains at any given moment, but they were just throwing money at any novel vaccine technologies they could find in hopes that something worked. Which obviously paid off with some really effective COVID vaccines, but also advanced the science on a bunch of stuff that didn't crack through but very well might with further research. Once the COVID vaccines were identified for production, the Warp Speed funding for the other stuff disappeared, but funding to keep that research going with stuff like NIH grants could keep things chugging along in the background, if we still have an NIH.
Of course, politics and nutjob conspiracy theories have now turned half the population against the development of new and better vaccines, so don't expect those programs to be funded for a number of years.
