Indian Scientists Claim To Have Designed Vaccine Against All Variants Of Coronavirus

New Delhi: Scientists at the Kazi Nazrul University, Asansol and Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhubaneshwar have designed a peptide vaccine that they claim could protect against any future variants of the coronavirus.

This comes at a time when the new variants of the coronavirus is triggering fresh waves of the highly infectious disease. 

The Journal of Molecular Liquids, which is devoted to fundamental aspects of structure, interactions and dynamic processes in simple, molecular and complex liquids, has accepted to publish their research.

The researchers said that they 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, in their study.

Researchers Abhigyan Choudhary and Suprabhat Mukherjee from Kazi Nazrul University and Parth Sarthi Sen Gupta, Saroj Kumar Panda and Malay Kumar Rana from IISER, Bhubaneshwar have said that the designed vaccine was found to be highly stable, antigenic and immunogenic.

The research team developed the vaccine using computational methods. The next stage would involve the production of the vaccine which would then be followed by testing.

Abhigyan Choudhary told the media that this vaccine is one of a kind and no other vaccine in the world has been designed to cope with all the Coronaviridie family viruses at a single time.

He said that the researchers had first identified various conserved regions in the spike protein of the six different viruses that undergo very few mutations and thus changed a little in the course of the pandemic.

He also added that these regions of the protein identified are highly immunogenic which means that they can produce high levels of immune memory in the body that is required to protect against these viruses.

Also read: Omicron: BA.2 Variant Detected in 57 Countries, Says WHO

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