University of Hyderabad (UoH)’s School of Life Sciences has announced the design of potential vaccine candidates called “T cell epitopes”, against all the structural and non-structural proteins of novel coronavirus-2 (COVID-19) for experimental testing.
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.
Using powerful immunoinformatics approaches with computational softwares, Seema Mishra of the department of biochemistry has designed these potential epitopes in a way that can be used to vaccinate an entire population.
Usually, a vaccine discovery takes 15 years but the powerful computational tools helped in quickly enlisting these vaccine candidates in about 10 days. A ranked list of potential candidate vaccines, based on how much effectively they will be used by human cells to stop the virus, has been generated.
With no matches present in human protein pool, these coronaviral epitopes pose no cross-reactivity to human cells and hence, the immune response will be against viral proteins and not human proteins. However, these results have to be investigated experimentally in order to provide conclusive evidence. These results have been disseminated to the scientific community using ChemRxiv preprint platform for urgent experimental assays, said an official press release.
These are the first such studies on nCoV vaccine design from India exploring whole coronaviral proteome across structural and non-structural proteins that make up the virus. 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,” she said.
For more details: https://chemrxiv.org/articles/T_Cell_Epitope-Based_Vaccine_Design_for_Pandemic_Novel_Coronavirus_2019-nCoV/12029523.
