University of Hyderabad faculty comes up with a potential COVID-19 vaccine
Amid a frightening picture being painted by
coronavirus concerns across the world, there's a ray of hope emerging
from the University of Hyderabad (UoH). In what could be a welcome
breakthrough for the country and even the world, a faculty member of the
biochemistry department has developed a possible vaccine against the
dreaded coronavirus infection.
These vaccine candidates are small coronaviral peptides, molecules which are used by cells to trigger an immune response to destroy cells harbouring these viral peptides. Using powerful immunoinformatics approaches with computational softwares, Dr Seema Mishra has designed these potential epitopes in a way that can be used to vaccinate an entire population.
Usually, vaccine discovery takes 15 years, but the powerful computational tools helped in quickly enlisting these vaccine candidates in about 10 days.
A ranked list of potential candidate vaccines, based on how effectively they will be used by human cells to stop the virus, has been generated. With no matches present in human protein pool, these coronaviral epitopes pose no cross-reactivity to human cells and hence, the immune response will be against viral proteins and not human proteins. However, these results have to be investigated experimentally in order to provide conclusive evidence.
Acknowledging that currently social distancing remains the best defence against nCov infections, the UoH stated that vaccination will take some time as further work is needed on the candidate epitopes.
"We are hopeful that our computational findings will provide a cost-and-time-effective framework for rapid experimental trials towards an effective nCoV vaccine," the statement said.
The University of Hyderabad clarified that although the research has been disseminated, the scientific community, in vitro studies are required to be conducted for establishing the findings conclusively.
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