Scientists on COVID-19 vaccine : Aim is to create a million doses by Sept.

Scientists are working on COVID-19 vaccine at University of Oxford. The project is being supported by the UK government. The trials on first set of patients will begin soon. It is not yet clear how effective the vaccine will be, according to reports. Scientists have said that a million doses could be ready by September this year.

World over vaccine trails are being carried out to find a solution for coronavirus.

According to WHO, 70 potential vaccines are currently under consideration out of which few have reached advanced stage.

An experimental vaccine developed by Hong Kong-listed CanSino Biologics Inc. and the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology, which is in phase 2, is undergoing trials.

U.S. drugmakers Moderna Inc. and Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc are developing treatments separately. These are now being tested on humans having bypassed preliminary stages, claim reports.

In his address to the nation today Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged young scientists to take lead in creating coronavirus vaccine.

“Friends, while India has limited resources today, I have a special request for India’s young scientists – to come forward and take a lead in creating a vaccine for Coronavirus; for the welfare of the world, for the welfare of the human race,” he said.

A while ago, Dr. Seema Mishra, faculty of the Department of Biochemistry, School of Life Sciences, University of Hyderabad (UoH) has come up with potential vaccine candidate for treating coronavirus.

She has designed “potential vaccine candidates, called T cell epitopes, against all the structural and non-structural proteins of novel coronavirus-2 (2019-nCoV) for experimental testing. These vaccine candidates are small coronaviral peptides, molecules which are used by cells to trigger an immune response to destroy cells harboring 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 entire population,” the University said in a statement.

The findings have been shared with the scientific community so that experimental testing can be carried out.

“Right now, best defense to prevent further nCoV infections is social distancing. Vaccination will take some time 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 nCoV vaccine,” the statement notes.

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