UoH faculty working on coronavirus vaccine

The University of Hyderabad is working on potential vaccine candidates, called T cell epitopes to fight COVID-19. The faculty at the Biochemistry department at the varsity has said that the vaccination will take some time due to the need for further work on these candidate epitopes.

Hyderabad: The faculty at the Biochemistry department at the University of Hyderabad are working on potential vaccine candidates, called T cell epitopes to fight COVID-19, the UoH said here on Friday.

The candidates are against all the structural and non- structural proteins of novel coronavirus-2 (2019-nCoV) for experimental testing, a varsity press release said 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, the release said.

Using powerful immunoinformatics approaches with computational software, Seema Mishra, a faculty member designed these potential epitopes in a manner that can be used to vaccinate entire populations, it said. Usually, vaccine discovery takes 15 years, but the powerful computational tools helped in quickly enlisting these vaccine candidates in about 10 days, UoH said. Right now, the best defence to prevent further infections is social distancing.

Vaccination will take some time due to the need for further work on these candidate epitopes, the release said.

PTI report