Indian scientists claim to have developed a universal vaccine that could be effective against all forms of the once-a-century-pandemic coronavirus two years ago.
With new forms of the SARS-COV-2 virus causing new waves of highly contagious disease, scientists from Kazi Nazrul University, Asansol and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhubaneswar have developed a peptide vaccine that claims They can protect against any disease. Future variants of coronavirus.
His research has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Molecular Liquids which is devoted to fundamental aspects of structure, interactions and dynamical processes in simple, molecular and complex fluids.
“In this study, we employed immunoinformatic approaches to design AbhiscoVac – a multi-epitope multi-target chimeric peptide that would be able to generate protective immunity against all six virulent members of the family hCoV-229E, hCoV-HKU1.” , hCoV-OC43, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV as well as SARS-CoV-2,” the researchers said.
Abhigyan Choudhary and Suprabhat Mukherjee from Kazi Nazrul University and Partha Sarathi Sen Gupta, Saroj Kumar Panda and Malay Kumar Rana of IISER, Bhubaneswar said, “The vaccine designed was found to be highly stable, antigenic and immunogenic.”
Choudhary said the team of researchers has developed the vaccine using computational methods and the next phase would involve production of the vaccine, which would then be followed by trials.
“This vaccine is one of a kind. No other vaccine in the world is designed to deal with all the coronavirus family viruses at the same time,” he told PTI.
He said the researchers had previously identified different conserved regions in the spike proteins of six different viruses that undergo very few mutations and thus change little during the pandemic.
In addition, these regions of the identified proteins are highly immunogenic, meaning they may produce a high level of immune memory in the body that is necessary to protect against viruses, he said.
“Unlike other vaccines, these were selected after showing high binding strength with a protein called TLR4 – the same protein responsible for detecting the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the body and initiating an immune response,” Choudhury said.
“We also simulated injection of the vaccine into virtual patients and found that this vaccine is highly capable of protecting the recipient from the virus,” he said.
This story has been published without modification in text from a wire agency feed. Only the title has been changed.
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