In what looks like a silver lining amidst the dark clouds, a faculty member from the University of Hyderabad has come up with what is being seen as a potential vaccine for the coronavirus. These newly developed boons against coronavirus are called cell epitopes.
The research has been shared with the wider scientific and medical fraternity. Seema Mishra can be credited for this project.
She teaches in the Department of Biochemistry, School of Life Sciences. She has created small corona viral peptides or molecules used by cells to trigger an immune response to destroy infected cells. The best aspect of these vaccines according to the creator is that it doesn’t destroy the protein in the body or doesn’t negatively impact the human cells but while acting s an immune response against the virus, it destroys the virus. However, it is important that these results are experimented upon in order to arrive at conclusive evidence
This constitutes the first study on the COVD-19 vaccine design in India.
It explores the entire coronaviral proteome across the structural and non-structural proteins that make up the virus, claims the university.
The university issued a statement wherein it said, “Right now, the best defence to prevent further COVID-19 infections is social distancing. Vaccination will take sometime due to the need for further work on these candidate epitopes. We are hopeful that our computational findings will provide a cost and time effective framework for rapid experimental trials towards an effective non-COVID vaccine.”
IIT Guwahati is also working on an anti-COVID-19 vaccine to help out against the coronavirus pandemic.
It is also working towards making rapid detection and portable diagnostic kits for various viruses and microorganisms.
