'Vaccine has potential to induce innate, adaptive immune systems & can neutralise SARS-CoV-2'

Kolkata: Scientists of Zoological Survey of India have recently proposed a model of a recombinant vaccine that can work against SARS-CoV 2. The vaccine, designed based on computational and immunoinformatics approaches, is capable of inducing both innate and adaptive immune response against SARS-CoV 2.

"The vaccine has all the potential to induce both innate and adaptive immune systems and can neutralise SARS-CoV-2. There is an immediate requirement for experimental validation of the designed vaccine for reaching a conclusion for its safety, efficacy and success," said Kailash Chandra, Director, ZSI.

The scientists associated with the study informed that instead of targeting a single protein or its structure, they selected peptide fragments from all the structural proteins identified by immune cells e.g. B-cell, T-cell and IFN gamma based on immunogenicity and non-allergenicity.

The identified peptide fragments with an adjuvant and several linkers were selected for the final vaccine construct. The simulation suggested that the proposed vaccine is stable and has been found effective on more than 50 percent of the worldwide population.

Further, the molecular interaction and docking analysis of vaccines with the toll-like receptors suggested that the designed vaccine is capable of inducing an effective innate immune response. The efficiency of the vaccine also depends on its expression in a suitable expression vector and thus after the expression analysis in E.coli, an elevated expression level of the vaccine was observed. To simulate the response of the immune system towards the vaccine, an in-silico simulation of the immune response was conducted.

After the subsequent three exposures of vaccine, an elevated level of both B-cell and T-cell mediated immune response with consistent high cytokine response was observed.

"Designing the proposed vaccine is purely based on the understanding of the genetics and predicted immuno-infection of the available genome of the Wuhan originated SARS-CoV-2 virus," said ZSI scientist Mukesh Thakur, who supervised this study.

Abhishek Singh, a research fellow at ZSI, undertook all the prediction modelling and designed the vaccine construct.

Over the past few decades, the scientific communities have been asked to develop and respond with the vaccine against the epidemics, but in none of the scenarios was this escalated rate of scientific contribution towards the development of the vaccine observed as with the SARS-CoV-2.

The research findings have been communicated in a leading international journal of high repute. It has also been uploaded on BIORXIV for an early circulation for benefitting the scientists and clinicians involved in making vaccine for

COVID-19.